Do your resume and your goals match up?
For example, a legislative seat requires a studious, legal approach; a governorship calls for more leadership potential than that of a legislator; a senatorial seat demands more leadership qualities than that of a congressman and the higher the office, the more important rhetorial skills become.
Unless you are running for a local seat like city commissioner or mayor, in which you are better served being as middle of the road as you can get, you will need to take the first step and that is to pick a political party and get into party work as quickly as possible. The party is where you'll learn the routines and the vocabulary. You will meet the people there who are able to bolster your ideas and you as a candidate. You will become effective when you work well with committees and groups of people and can persuade them to consider your ideas as a part of their ideas. A single issue won't do it.
You need to pick the brain of everyone you meet, from the leadership of the areas you are concerned with such as education and law enforcement personnel to the general citzenry of your voting district.
After doing this, you must go to the leaders you suspect might support you.
This is a hardball approach, but a candidate has to know if these people will support him/her and how. Will the support come to you in the form of lip service, of money, of actually working for you, or will it come to you privately. This same kind of visiting must be done with party people as well. In the case of women this private contribution may be an offer of babysitting or a hot dish brought to your family so that you can be out door-to-door campaigning during prime hours.
Candidates can delude themselves with wishful thoughts of support they don't have. When you get out on the plank, will you find that it has been sawed off?
A mistake many candidates make even in national level campaigns, is to ask a friend to manage their campaigns. Because he/she is a friend, no matter how poorly the campaign is run, you can't fire that person. The interaction between you and your friend may be right, but look instead for a highly experienced campaign manager, who has a consistent winning record for the type of office you are pursuing.
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