War Room

Addisu Demissie

Consultant
Future Forward

Addisu Demissie is a strategic consultant and nationally recognized political leader with more than two decades of experience guiding high-stakes campaigns and public affairs efforts. As co-founder and principal of 50+1 Strategies, he built a thriving consulting firm advising more than 200 candidates, companies, and advocacy organizations.

He has served as campaign manager for major national and statewide races, including Cory Booker’s presidential and U.S. Senate campaigns and Gavin Newsom’s successful gubernatorial bid, and served as a senior advisor to the last three Democratic presidential general election campaigns. Addisu also co-founded and led More Than A Vote, partnering with LeBron James and other professional athletes to combat voter suppression and expand civic participation.

A trusted strategist and communicator, he has contributed to MSNBC and CNN and co-hosted Pod Save America. He holds a B.A. from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and serves on several nonprofit boards focused on civic engagement and democracy.

Anat Shenker-Osorio

Principal & Founder
ASO Communications

Host of the Words to Win By podcast and Principal of ASO Communications, Anat Shenker-Osorio examines why certain messages falter where others deliver. She has led research for new messaging on issues ranging from freedom to join together in union to clean energy and from immigrant rights to reforming criminal justice. Anat’s original approach through priming experiments, task-based testing, and online dial surveys has led to progressive electoral and policy victories across the globe.

Anat delivers her findings packed in snark at venues such as the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Centre for Australian Progress, Irish Migrant Centre, Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and LUSH International. Her writing and research are profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Salon, The Guardian, and Grist, among others. She is the author of Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense About the Economy.

Abby Curran Horrell

Executive Director
HMP

Abby Curran Horrell currently serves as Executive Director of House Majority PAC, the only Super PAC focused solely on electing Democrats to the U.S. House. As the largest House Democratic outside spender, HMP has played a critical and strategic role in every competitive House race in the last 15 years. HMP has raised and spent a billion dollars during her tenure.

Horrell has over two decades of experience in Democratic politics. She most recently served as chief of staff to Congresswoman Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, who led the moderate New Democrat Coalition – the largest ideological caucus in the House. She previously worked at the DCCC, where she served as the Northeast Political Director on the independent expenditure team. She managed former Congressman Baron Hill’s successful comeback bid and has held additional senior roles in campaigns at the presidential, gubernatorial, US Senate, and US House levels. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and lives in Alexandria with her husband and two young children.

Ausaf Qarni

Director, Research and Analytics
Working America AFL-CIO

Ausaf Qarni, Director of Research and Analytics at Working America, oversees the organization’s analytics initiatives. Managing a team of analysts, he focuses on assessing the effectiveness of innovative practices within Working America’s programs using randomized control trials. His analysis of campaigns and experimental results contributes to fostering a culture of learning within the progressive movement. He spends much of his time extracting actionable, quantitative insights from the vast database of over 15 million face-to-face conversations conducted by Working America canvassers, more than 1,000 clinical experiments spanning in-person and digital media campaigns, his involvement in over 400 contests and campaigns to provide direct benefits to working-class people.

Bradley Komar

Senior Advisor
HMP

Brad Komar is Senior Advisor at House Majority PAC, where he served as Independent Expenditure Director in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. He previously served as Campaign Manager for Ralph Northam for Governor in Virginia, John Hickenlooper for President, and Hickenlooper’s gubernatorial reelection in Colorado. Brad was the Colorado State Director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 primary campaign. Over the past 19 years, he has worked on state house, Congressional, statewide, and Presidential campaigns in Colorado, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia.

Kate Duch

Principal
One Minus Beta Analytics

Kate is the Principal at One Minus Beta Analytics. She is a Ph.D.-trained social scientist with over 15 years of experience conducting randomized controlled experiments. 

Kate has designed, managed, and analyzed nearly 150 experiments. She is a two-time recipient of the Analyst Institute’s Best Experiment award, once for embedding an innovative persuasion experiment into a competitive U.S. Senate race and once for conducting a groundbreaking GOTV experiment that outperformed the existing best practice.

Before launching One Minus Beta, Kate was the Director of Political Research at the Analyst Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Duke University, where she was a University Scholar and a recipient of the James B. Duke Fellowship. She received her M.S. and B.S. from Cornell University. She was a voting member of the Board of Trustees at Duke University (2014-2015) and at Cornell University (2007-2009).

Kate is originally from Buffalo, NY, and currently resides in Golden, CO.

Matt Morrison

Executive Director
Working America AFL-CIO

Matt Morrison is the executive director of Working America, a three-million-member labor organization mobilizing working people who don’t have the benefit of a union at their jobs. He is a leading political practitioner with experience working in over 500 elections throughout his career. Most recently, Working America has achieved a 76 percent win rate in the 87 competitive elections it has worked in since November 2016.

The American Political Science Association has described Morrison’s work as a “bedrock of experimentation in American politics” and recognized him as “influential on our understanding of political campaigns within political science” (2018).

Matthew Yglesias

Writer
Slow Boring

Matthew Yglesias writes the Slow Boring newsletter.

Maya Handa

NYC World Cup Czar
NYC Mayor’s Office

Maya Handa is a political strategist who most recently managed NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s winning general election campaign. Prior to her role on Mayor Mamdani’s campaign, she worked as a management consultant, in international development and emergency response, and on Democratic campaigns at the national, state, and municipal levels across the country. She has a B.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Meg Schwenzfeier

Senior Advisor
DCCC

Meg is a senior advisor at the DCCC, focusing on messaging and analytics. Previously, she was the Chief Analytics Officer on the Harris-Walz campaign. She also led analytics at the DSCC in 2022 and data science on the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign.

Pete Backof

Strategist
Civil Advice

Pete Backof works at Civic Advice, a firm that connects donors to high-impact, cost-effective voter engagement strategies and organizations. He has worked as a data analyst and organizational leader in the civic engagement space for over 10 years. Pete has a Master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago and lives in Washington, DC.