The New Politics Network
It’s all about the network. When the New Politics Institute launched in May 2005, a central task was to begin to build a network of people who could help progressives master the new politics emerging out of today’s tumultuous changes in technology, media and demographics. 
A traditional think tank would have hired fellows to sit in offices in Washington DC and think. But the New Politics Institute wanted people with active real world experience in politics and in the front lines of these rapidly changing fields.
The New Politics Institute started with a strong core founding team and a diverse group of fellows who spanned a range of political perspectives in the broader progressive community. Some of the original group included Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who runs DailyKos, the largest political blog in the world; Joe Trippi, the out-of-the-box campaign manager of Howard Dean; Sergio Bendixen, one of the top Hispanic pollsters, and Mark Penn, who is best known as President Clinton’s pollster and political advisor for his second term. The founding network also included Andy and Deborah Rappaport, innovative investors in political startups; Gina Glantz, senior advisor to Andy Stern at the path-breaking Service Employees International Union (SEIU); Jamie Daves, an entrepreneur seeking new ways to finance media with a mission, among others you can find inside.
The group of fellows expanded over the first year to include those with different expertise, including Luis Ubiñas, the leader of McKinsey’s west coast media practice and an expert in television; Jennifer Nix, an innovator in short, quick political books; political demographer and numbers-cruncher Ruy Texeira; and Tim Chambers, a leader of Sony’s Advanced Media Platforms who started his own mobile media company. Other top professionals, like generational expert William Strauss or Julie Bergman Sender, a motion picture executive and producer known for popular political viral videos, became part of our extended network by writing reports or making presentations in Washington DC. You'll find more of them when you browse reports or events.
A top priority for NPI going forward will be building out our network of more leading technology, media and demographic experts who are motivated to use their private sector know-how to help change politics. We believe professionals like these are an extremely valuable yet underutilized asset for progressives because they can do much to transition best practices from the private sector into politics.
Equally valuable are the political innovators who can take that private sector knowledge and translate it into politics. This two-way dialogue is where the real innovation comes; that is how the strategies will be invented that work in the long run. The New Politics Institutes is fortunate to have two people leading the organization who represent the joining of those two groups:
Simon Rosenberg is the founder of NPI working out of the Washington DC office. Simon brings years of experience and a dense network of relationships in the political world. Simon is President of NDN, which he founded in 1996 as a Washington-based political action committee and later transformed into a powerful national network which is supporting a new generation of ideas, initiatives and leaders. Simon was a leading candidate for Chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2005, and he has been working to elect Democrats for nearly twenty years in a dozen states. Before founding NDN, he served as a key member of two presidential campaigns, including working for Bill Clinton in the New Hampshire primary and the Little Rock War Room in 1991-92. From 1993-1996, he worked at the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Leadership Council.
Peter Leyden is the Director of NPI working out of the San Francisco office. Peter brings a similar wealth of experience and a dense network of relationships in the technology and media and demographics worlds. Leyden comes from Global Business Network, a futures research and strategic consulting firm that pioneered the use of a diverse networks of talented individuals to solve difficult problems. Leyden previously worked as the managing editor at the original Wired magazine that helped drive the digital revolution and create the early online new media. He has been a journalist, a special correspondent for Newsweek in Asia, and coauthor of two books, The Long Boom and What's Next.
Together Rosenberg and Leyden and all the fellows and staff at the New Politics Institute are building a network of thought leaders and strategists who will help progressives reinvent and master the new politics of our era.
