> Does that mean someone who continuously runs for office is de facto impossible to fire?
No, it means you can't fire them for the fact that they are a candidate.
You can choose to fire them for the fact that (say) they don’t show up repeatedly to their scheduled work. You could even deny them time off they want to use to campaign when they have time off on the books, too, so long as you did so because of legitimate business needs where you would have denied a vacation request even if it was not for the political campaign (if the trier of fact in a lawsuit challenging it finds that you did so because of the campaign, that's a problem.)
I don't know why people equate “you can’t fire people for X” with “you can’t fire a person if X”, but only for certain values of X. Like, you can’t fire a person for their gender, but no one thinks that means you can’t fire a person if they have a gender.
No, it means you can't fire them for the fact that they are a candidate.
You can choose to fire them for the fact that (say) they don’t show up repeatedly to their scheduled work. You could even deny them time off they want to use to campaign when they have time off on the books, too, so long as you did so because of legitimate business needs where you would have denied a vacation request even if it was not for the political campaign (if the trier of fact in a lawsuit challenging it finds that you did so because of the campaign, that's a problem.)
I don't know why people equate “you can’t fire people for X” with “you can’t fire a person if X”, but only for certain values of X. Like, you can’t fire a person for their gender, but no one thinks that means you can’t fire a person if they have a gender.