About Our Candidate Endorsement Process
LA Forward endorses progressive candidates for local office after a comprehensive and deliberative process that ensures you can trust our recommendation. Our goal is to help you navigate the complicated choices on your ballot and which candidates are worth supporting with your time and money.
Our local candidate endorsements are the result of a multi-step process.
In persons candidate forums open to all of our dues-paying members
We contact candidates for races we determine we will consider for our endorsement and ask them to fill out our candidate questionnaire. Our 15-person endorsement taskforce — with representation from our different issue teams, regional groups, and partner organizations — reviews the written questionnaires from each candidate and conducts interviews with the candidates who submit a questionnaire.
Based on questionnaires and interviews, our endorsement task force makes recommendations to our dues-paying members, who vote on them. To protect our process and the voices of our members, we don’t allow anyone – including candidates – to buy memberships for their supporters to attempt to influence our endorsement votes.
Due to our limited capacity, LA Forward does not endorse candidates in every race in the county. Our current priorities are Countywide seats, LA Citywide offices, LA City Council, some LA Countywide seats such as Superior Court, and city councils in San Gabriel Valley and Westside, and other places where we have a base of supporters.
For candidates: If we plan to make an endorsement in your race, we contact your campaign to ask you to complete our candidate questionnaire to be considered for our process.
Our team has limited bandwidth to respond to a high volume of inquiries about individual races – but if you have an urgent or essential question, you can reach us via the contact form on our website.