Why and How Republican Campaign Experts Are Trying to Defeat a Republican President
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Mike Madrid is one of America’s leading Republican political strategists. In particular, he’s an expert on Latino voting trends, starting with his master’s thesis at Georgetown University. He’s the former press secretary for the California Assembly Republican leader and as the former political director for the California Republican Party. He’s been named as one of America’s Most Influential Hispanics by Hispanic Business Magazine.
And Mike Madrid is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project. That’s a group of top Republican consultants working to help elect Democrat Joe Biden, because they believe our Republican president is a threat to democracy itself. Other members of the Lincoln Project include John McCain presidential campaign manager Steve Schmidt, attack ad expert Rick Wilson, and lawyer George Conway, the husband of President Trump’s senior adviser Kelly Anne Conway.
Host Spencer Critchley talks with Mike about how he and his Lincoln Project partners strategize to use communications so effectively. Their anti-Trump ads are brutally effective, going for the gut in ways that Republicans are often better at than Democrats, and exploiting leading-edge thinking about messaging, targeting, and social media.
Mike shares great insights about how effective political communication works — and how different that is from what many people assume.
About Mike Madrid
For over twenty years, Lincoln Project co-founder Mike Madrid has been changing the outcomes of political campaigns throughout the country. His active involvement in local, state, and federal races has helped him to develop a keen insight into the successful characteristics of winning campaigns.
Madrid is a nationally recognized expert on Latino voting trends. He graduated from the Edmund G. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1997, where he wrote his senior thesis on Latino politics and the perspective that politicization of emerging Latino voter groups in Southwestern states was unique in American history.
The completion of his thesis at Georgetown University in Washington DC on Latino voters became the basis for his pioneering work on Latino communications and outreach strategies in California, Texas, Florida and nationwide. He has served as the press secretary for the California Assembly Republican leader and as the political director for the California Republican Party. In these roles, Madrid played a key role in pioneering Latino outreach and communications strategies.
In 2001 Madrid was named as one of America’s “Most Influential Hispanics” by Hispanic Business Magazine. He is a fellow at the Unruh Institute for Politics at USC and is a co-director of the Los Angeles / USC Times Poll and in 2013, was appointed to the Board of Directors of the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC). Currently, Mike serves as adjunct lecturer on Race, Class and Partisanship at the University of Southern California.