There is no specific dollar amount to run for sheriff. The cost of any sheriff election varies depending on your location, the number of candidates running for the position, and amount of overall money raised and spent by the candidates.
In general, a sheriff candidate needs:
- A strong campaign team who will work with the candidate on fundraising, voter outreach, and other areas of campaigning.
- A campaign budget that includes: advertising, printing, staff salaries, office supplies, and other expenses.
Besides the expense of a campaign, becoming a sheriff requires training and certification, which may incur its own costs.
One way to find out how much your election might cost is to check how much was spent on previous elections. This will give you a rough idea of how much you may need to raise and spend. It’s better to expect to need more money than you may want to budget. Indeed, the cost of some sheriff races run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In the final days of a campaign, there is a lot of pressure on candidates to make sure they don’t run out of money. If you run out of money, especially near Election Day, it is a sure way to lose momentum with voters. It makes sense to have some financial reserves in place.
A sobering fact to political campaigning is that the better funded candidate will win 90% of the the time.