Will determine whether the democrats will wrest control in the senate. We have so much at stake. But what we found is that our politics need to evolve. That our political system how campaigns are run, who are the prime voters, what are the issues, how do we talk about and talk to our voters, how do we strategize to win as a Progressive Movement, all of those things are directly influenced by how dramatically our demographics have changed. And the fact that, elect orally andtorally speaking we saw that in the book brown is the new white by Steve Phillips that we actually have the numbers to win. We have the electoral majority, comprised of those who reelected president obama in 2012. And those who continue to move to the United States into a country that is majority people of color. That is the reality in seven states and will be the reality, in just a couple of decades, across the country. This new american majority, this multiracial, Progressive Electoral majority, will need new strategies in order to engage and make sure that not only our politics reflect the new strategies, but our leadership and our issues ,eflect the hopes and dreams and the vision, of those of us who are the majority in this country. So this session is about a new kind of politics that goes deep into how we run our political system and our vision of who should be involved and who should be the center, not only in Democratic Party politics, its bigger than that, but in the vision for the partys future. I am extremely thrilled to have a panel of National Experts in the new politics for a new american majority here. First, im aimee allison, Senior Vice President of power pac plus, an organization, pac, that promotes the new american majority politically and has recently released democracy in color, a multimedia platform as thats the voice of the new american majority. We have a blog, a podcast. The idea is for us to examine these kinds of issues. Today, the recording will be on a future democracy in color podcast, as well as your questions. We will spend about an hour in conversation, and then we will invite your questions, coming up. So, to introduce our panel, first i want to introduce sayu bhojwani, the president of new american leaders project, the only organization in the country thats dedicated to bringing new americans into the political process. Please welcome sayu. [applause] chuck rocha is president of solidarity, the largest person of color Political Consulting firm in the country. Nation. The largest. Please, thank chuck for joining us. [applause] and carol mcdonald, senior strategist with 76 words, a Democratic Media firm owned by women and people of color. Thank you so much for joining us. [applause] so, i would like to do this. I would like each one of our esteemed panelists to talk with us a couple of moments. Then we will come together in conversation. Sound good . All right. Looking forward to the conversation. Lets begin with chuck. Chuck thank you, and thank you all for not staying in your lunch too long and coming here. I will talk about probably one of the most important issues to me, personally. A man of color who has worked in campaigns for 25 years. My first election was in 1994. I wont tell my age. I shaved all of my gray hair off. My first election was ann richards. As you can tell, i am not from st. Louis or washington, d. C. I am from texas, hence why i speak like an old white man. But a person of color sounding like an old white man is the new american majority. We common all shapes and sizes from all over the country. What is the new american majority . Who is this rising american electorate . We are a young people. We are people of color. We are lots of different multi generational multiethnic. , we are who america talks about a lot but our politicians , do not talk to. This slide should show you the different faces, when i was thinking about the new american majority. It was these faces, and these faces for a reason. It was these faces because all of these people are either current or former employees of mine. Solidarity strategies has hired 54 different people in the six years we have been in existence, and over 50 of those were people of color. The ones in red are current employees. When we put staff together, we wanted it to reflect america. Luis who was born in mexico. Roberto, my Vice President , now a managing director at a women of color prfirm. Even kira, former miss america, whose family is from russia. She is an immigrant. Kwami, whose father is from africa and came as a refugee. And keilyn, the latino vote director for Hillary Clinton. What do you get when you work with people with like mindedness as your own . You can be inspired share your , ideas. My staff brings me new ideas every day. I learned the way the modern new young person of color thinks person of color actually looks at politics. Solidarity strategies was actually one of the firms behind Bernie Sanders. Bernie sanders spent more money on people of colorowned firms than anybody in the history of president ial primary elections. Hired more people on firms to do any consulting than anybody in the history of president and that president ial primary elections. My firm was the biggest recipient of that. He did not hire solidarity strategies to talk to other brown folks or other folks like myself. We did the general electoral work. We got to sit at the table. When we were having breakfast when you put us in charge of , hiring, guess who we hire . More folks like us. That makes us better as a campaign. Some of the tactics we will talk about of why Bernie Sanders did as well as he did with people under 35, including people of color under 35, how did a white man from vermont, a selfavowed socialist, win people under 35 . People of color under 35 . They are normally not your prime voters. Why was he winning these people . Because we targeted them and we went and talked to them. Yes, we had a lot of money to go figure out different models. Lets take one state where everybody signed up on a website, if they loved Bernie Sanders in oregon or texas. Lets talk about texas. Redish state of red. Year, 157,000this people had signed up on the Bernie Sanders website in just texas. Guess what we did. We took all of those names, addresses, and phone numbers and created models of people who are likely Bernie Sanders supporters. Guess what model they did not fit in . They do not fit in your campaign in a box. The reason our new american majority gets overlooked is that they may not be the prime voter. They may not fit in the box of who the persuadable voter should be. Oh, theyre black, or brown, or asian. If they have never voted, we are not going to talk to them. If they vote, we will move them over to the gop universe that talks to them at the very end. Bernie sanders did not operate his campaign that way. One reason was he would not win the primary with regular democratic voters. They were locked down for Hillary Clinton, as they should have been. He had to expand his universe, and but he did it this way. Mostly, they expand into suburban housewives, folks who are marginalized. That is never any of us. So we will talk about that strategy. Lastly, nontraditional approach where thousands of new registrants in four months. In oregon, there were 121,000 new registers. This week in florida, the florida nine, the orlando area, i polled that there were 13,000 latinos who had some voting history. Back to your number. We always do, right . But because i am running the campaign, i said lets check how many new people of color have registered there in the last six months because of the president ial primary, whether hillary or bernie 8500 people of color, in just this c. D. They had registered in the six months. No one will ever target those people because they have never voted. We are. I will send mail. Love sending them some mail. That is how daddy gets paid. We will send mail. We will also call and send digital advertising, to see if they are interested in a young state senator by the name of darren soto. He will run for the congressional seat. Thats only because the old mexican is running the campaign. Thats the difference here. When we are in charge of doing this, at every level, we think outside of the box. What we will talk about is that change. And i will turn it over to the next people, and we will talk about some of the strategies and how you put them into of that. Into effect. Up wast slide we put some of the digital and mail and peertopeer hiring strategies we have. Hiring Beautiful People to deliver that mess to generate power away. [applause] aimee carol mcdonald. Yeah, carol. Carol oh, hey, hey, i brought my fan club. Let me take a few minutes to switch my powerpoint slides. How are we doing today . All right. Thank you. Thank you. I am from the south, so that is very important. We practiced before we got here. Thats fine. My presentation had both my prompts and a cute picture of my daughter, because i always say, when i come to things like netroots, i always feel like i am in a room of experts. So i hope i have something new to impart to you. When my presentation goes sideways, i always turn to the picture of my girl, because she adorable and that is a good way to deflect. I am carol mcdonald. I work at a firm called 76 words. One of the things i want to piggyback off of what chuck mentioned is we are a firm owned by women and people of color. There are four of us. Me, an africanamerican women, a latino woman, and a latino man, and one white guy just for good measure. There are few media firms that look like us. Some of our other staff and interns are all young people of color. What that does for us is it changes the way we have a conversation. It changes the way we think about our clients and how we represent them, both our clients and our clients not of color. One of the things i noticed when i am in spaces like netroots, although i will give this organization a lot of credit over the last few years of being deliberate about diversifying participants as well as presenters. I have been doing politics and political work 20 years now. You go to places, our firm is d. C. , likeington, america votes. I was recently at a campaigns and elections conference where i was asked to speak on this topic. A lot of what i hear from fellow consultants and this is going to be a loving calling in of our community and people who do this work is that you have a lot of white consultants, particularly who are in messaging and media, like i am, and they talked about how they take their general message they have developed for whatever campaign or candidate and how to adapt it to communities of color. How do we adapt it for a latino audience. How do we adapt it for a younger audience . As we have talked about before, if the demographics of our country are shifting, and the demographics of voters are becoming more black and brown and young, why are they the side audience and why are we not treating them as a main audience . When you treat them as a primary audience, then everything has to shift. Everything has to look different than what it does now. I think we have gotten to the where we are at a Tipping Point point and we can no longer votersr black and brown and young voters as a secondary audience. Chuck mentioned, as we look at nontraditional approaches and dig deeper into the voter profile and stop looking for those voters who have voted consistently in the last 3, 4, 5 elections and look at new registrants, it changes the picture completely. I really wanted to show what i do is messaging and media. What i have an example of is how does the product differ . When voices of color and women and young folks and unmarried folks and those of us in nontraditional blended families, when we are at the decisionmaking table of what the message looks like, what are the differences . So once some of our other speakers have gone, i will try to figure this out. Because the interactive part of this exercise is how to look at us and help us illuminate and point out what some of those differences are. I have a very amazing clip i want to share with you. But before i let go of the mic, i want to acknowledge one of our clients who is in the room. That is tishaura jones. She is the city treasurer in st. Louis and is running for reelection. I am super thrilled our firm will help her in that effort. What we need are more tishauras of the world, moving a little bit away from talking about the electorate and those of us in office and running for office. She has been a tremendous asset to the city of st. Louis. Again, as a black woman brings a different perspective to the politics, one very much needed. So we are thrilled to support candidates like her and building out a actually building deep practice of supporting women of color, particularly black woman, as they seek elected office. Lets snap for that. [applause] what . What . I will turn this over to my fellow panelists and then try to find a mouse to make this work. Aimee all right, thank you. Ok sayu, sayu bhojwani. , sayu i have my own show and tell. They are live. Theres three alum from the project here today. They did not know they were going to be called out, but i will call them out because then you guys can call me out if i say things that arent true. Jessica rubio, ernesto [applause] carol look for them on the ballot from arizona and orange county. I am sayu bhojwani, founder of the new american leaders project. I want to take a little bit about why i started the organization and what we do. The thought is i am doing the long view, but actually, we have 30 people on the ballot, mostly in arizona and orange county, which are core areas we have been working in over the last few years. In 2008, when we are in the middle of another exciting president ial election, i was sitting around the table in d. C. With immigrant rights advocates. We were beating ourselves up again about what had gone wrong in 2006 and 2007 and how we were going to fix that with a new president and how we were going to get Immigration Reform in the first year and first term if president obama won. Well, here we are eight years later with no Immigration Reform. So, at the time when we were having a conversation i realized , we were constantly blaming ourselves when it was not the immigrant Rights Community that where the problem. It was the people in office who were the problem. We needed to change who was in congress but who was in office at the local and state level to build that pipeline to congress. So thats what we do train , people to run for office because they are deeply connected to their communities, understand the experiences of their communities, and can win campaigns and govern in ways more responsive to immigrants and people of color. There are three strategies i think are central to the way we do our work. One is we do not see immigrants as an outreach strategy. We see immigrants, first, second, Third Generation anyone who identifies with that experience as core and central to the work we do. The way we do that work is to conduct our Campaign Training in a way that was designed for this population. Not here is Campaign Training, here is how we have always done it, and now lets get more diversity. Our strategy is one about inclusion that says here is Campaign Training where you can talk about your immigrant experience in a way that can affect and reach voters of all backgrounds in a valuebased framework. You can talk about targeting in a way that is not just about prime voters, but also about low and new propensity voters. And you can fundraise, even in communities portrayed as low income and as takers, not makers. You can create opportunities for those folks to feel like they are part of american democracy. In terms of the story, donors, we are really doing Campaign Training in a different way that is designed with the immigrant Community Front and center as the key linchpins of changing the way democracy works here. So that is the first thing, not seeing immigrants as an outreach shortage, where you plop down an existing program. The second is that we reframe the conversation around policymaking as not just how you create a policy and then go and translate it or figure out how to get out to immigrant communities and tell them about that policy. What we are saying is that we create policy that is now much more that can be more cognizant of who america truly is. 38 of the country are people of color now. 38 . So when you talk about policymaking in america, you cant the talking about policy in a certain old frame and then say lets go get it out to latinos and Asian Americans and african americans. You really have to design policy in a completely different way, so up turning what we are doing from the very beginning. And the third thing is to put the public back in public service. Although that sounds like a sound bite, it is really a critical component of how we train and support people who run for office. Because one of the things we heard over and over from people is i got a lot of support when running for office, and then i got put into office, and people were like bye, we will check in with you and make sure you pass all of the policies that we want you to pass but that is not how it works. Politics is politics for a reason. You have to learn how to play the game at a certain level. And so part of our job as an organization is not just to train people to run for office but also to support them when , they get into office. To help them remember and help them understand what it means to be a Movement Builder once you are an elected official. Because we are training Movement Builders and we want them to keep those guys once they are in office. Those values are like continuing to engage your constituency. Continuing to create a feedback loop, so youre hearing from folks are about what they need. Being kind of a constituent Relations Officer in a way. If you are at a very local level, you are responding to every day constituent needs