Simon Rosenberg was at it again.Immigration hadn’t been in the news much on the campaign trail in recent months. But in June, President Obama granted relief from deportation to an estimated 800,000 young people, Mitt Romney gave a speech on immigration to Latino elected officials and the Supreme Court announced its decision on Arizona’s divisive law, SB1070.
Rosenberg began sending out the sort of memos he has used to guide policy and politics on immigration since the middle of the last decade, offering his take on each event.
A long roster of national figures in politics, communications and activism can speak to the impact of these memos and the rest of Rosenberg’s work, particularly as founder and president of NDN, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank and advocacy organization formerly known as the New Democrat Network.
They’ll tell you Rosenberg is a pioneer in polling and other research that firmly established the importance of the Latino voter to presidential elections, and that he continues to shape the ongoing debate over the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration reform.
“Simon Rosenberg has been a huge surrogate and voice for Latinos,” says Jimmy Learned, the Peruvian founder of Elevation, a Washington, D.C.-based advertising agency that worked with Rosenberg on “Más que un partido,” an ad campaign for the Democratic Party during the 2006 World Cup.
“He understands the idiosyncrasies and nuances” of Latinos, Learned says. The “Más que un partido” campaign is a worthy example, based on a double entendre in Spanish, playing off the word “partido,” which means “game,” as in soccer game, as well as “party,” as in Democratic Party.
But Rosenberg’s work with Latinos in politics goes further back, according to Andrés Ramírez, former senior vice president for Hispanic programs at NDN and founder of Ramírez Group, a Las Vegas consulting firm.
Ramírez recalls hearing that former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former Rep. Bob Menéndez were interested in polling Latinos during the years leading up to the 2004 presidential elections. The idea was to get a more detailed understanding of Latino voters, and how they differed from region to region.
“No one had really done this before,” Ramírez says. Working with pollster Sergio Bendixen, Rosenberg approached local experts like Ramírez for help in designing the most effective polls. One result was the conviction that five states—Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Florida—would become increasingly vital to presidential campaigns as battleground states with fast-growing Hispanic populations.
A former television news writer and producer, Rosenberg understood the power of the media in politics. During this period, he also helped develop some of the earliest ads in Spanish for the Democratic Party.
All this work grew out of Rosenberg’s observations of what he has called “powerful new demographic realities” occurring across the nation since his birth in 1963. His work in TV news and on the first Bill Clinton campaign gave him useful vantage points on these realities. When he founded the New Democrat Network in 1996, it was only a matter of time before Rosenberg would turn his attention to the importance of Hispanics in national elections.
By 2004, Menéndez, now chair of the House Democratic Caucus, was telling TIME magazine that Rosenberg’s organization “really gets where we are at.”
Ramírez admits that ideas such as polling Latino voters, focusing on swing states and advertising in Spanish now seem commonplace.
“It’s easy to understand now—but back then, when people talked about the Latino electorate, it was about big states like California and Texas, and in abstract terms, in generalities,” he says.
But Rosenberg changed that. “He really bought into the idea of figuring out the Latino mobilization conundrum, and nobody else had figured this out,” Ramírez says.
By 2006, polling and other research on Latino voters led Rosenberg and NDN to what he describes as a “battle” that continues to the present on the policy and politics of immigrants and the U.S.-Mexico border. Rosenberg launched some of the first extensive polling on early versions of immigration reform, including polls in the five states that became important battlegrounds in presidential elections. But when immigration reform measures sputtered to a halt in Congress in 2010, Rosenberg says, he “spent a few months thinking about what we could do next.” So began a project called “The 21st Century Border Initiative,” mostly funded by the Ford Foundation.
The idea: “to rethink the way we imagine our border,” Rosenberg explains. This included determining how on-the-ground conditions had changed in recent years on the U.S. side of the border, and putting emphasis on trade relations between Mexico and the United States. The initiative’s research showed there had been improvement in border security, with a drop in crime, and increased commerce. Border mayors, including Republicans, were saying that “things were going better than we realized,” Rosenberg says.
“We’re trying to help people understand a lot is going on right here,” he adds. The project aims to move border issues “into the mainstream of political debate, and make the border not distant and scary.”
Looking back, the last decade-plus in Rosenberg’s career can be seen as an effort to shape opinion through research so that people realize the implications of what he calls “a new politics based on changes in demographics and media technology.”
His goal: “to have America be seen not only as west of Europe and east of Asia but north of Latin America.”
Meanwhile, the 2012 presidential election is the first in more than a decade in which Rosenberg is not involved. Learned says he is “a little saddened” by this because Rosenberg “is important to the mission of galvanizing the Latino constituency.”
But Rosenberg says his work on the Latino electorate and presidential campaigns was meant to motivate others to do more research and advertising in Spanish. “Our goal was to make ourselves unnecessary,” he says. The former television newsman intends to continue working on immigration, an issue he feels strongly about since three of his grandparents, all of whom he knew as a youngster, were immigrants—an Irish Catholic, a German Protestant and an Eastern European Jew.
“My grandparents’ stories were very inspiring to me,” he says. “I have an immediate passion and connectedness to this issue.” •
