Former CA Assembly Majority Leader and Ronin Project Podcast Host Bill Wong give their hot takes on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago from Aug. 19 to 22, 2024.  This episode is 100% certified F-Bomb Free.

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Roshni Nedungadi is a founding partner and chief research officer of HIT Strategies, the leading millennial and minority-owned public opinion research firm in Washington, D.C. Roshni has led expansive, multi-phase research projects exploring how people across the United States feel about gun control, mass incarceration, abortion, and other important issues on behalf of advocacy leaders such as Everytown for Gun Safety, NARAL, and Vera Institute for Justice. 

Roshni’s research seeks to find nuance in how Americans, particularly BIPOC individuals and low-propensity voters, conceptualize these issues at a time where division and partisanship run rampant. Roshni’s research on behalf of HIT Strategies ultimately is meant to lift up the voices of marginalized communities in the United States, one of the fastest-growing and oft-ignored voting blocks in American politics.

https://hitstrat.com/

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Join Ronin Project Podcast host, Bill Wong, for an insightful recap of AAPI races in California's March 5, 2024 Primary Election.

The Ronin Project Podcast's regular interview format will continue next week with pollster Roshni Nedungadi, co-founder of HIT Strategies.

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Warren T. Furutani has been a community and political activist for over 50 years. In the late 60’s he help start the Asian American and Pacific Islander social justice movement. He started as a student activist and fought for college admissions programs for people of color and women. He worked to establish ethnic studies and helped start Asian American Studies programs at UCLA and Cal State Long Beach. 

He was one of the founders of the Manzanar Pilgrimage/Committee and worked in the APIA community and other communities of color around a multitude of civil rights and social justice issues. 

He was also the first APIA elected to the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education (two terms, eight years), the second APIA to be elected to the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees (three terms, ten years), and served in the State Assembly (three terms), where he chaired the APIA Legislative Caucus for three years.

He retired from the legislature in November, 2012 and has since served as a Commissioner on the Los Angeles City Board of Public Works. Currently, he is a senior fellow at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and recently retired as a senior advisor to Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin De Leon.

Warren is married to Lisa Abe Furutani and they have two sons and two grand children.

https://www.ac-tiv-ist.com/

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Madalene Xuan-Trang Mielke is a nationally recognized civil rights leader and a member of USA Today’s Inaugural Leaders of Change. As President & CEO of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS) and Founder and Principal of Arum Group, LLC, she brings nearly 25 years of experience working in political campaigns and specializes in political/non-profit fundraising and political training.​

After returning from the ’96 campaign, Ms. Mielke worked for the Co-Executive Director at the Presidential Inaugural Committee and later to Vice President Gore’s team. Ms. Mielke started fundraising while working at the New Democrat Network PAC and she returned to her roots as the Training Director for the Ron Brown-Paul Tully Institute (BTI), the training arm of the DNC. In 2002 Ms. Mielke started her political consulting firm, specializing in fundraising and political training. Madalene has collaborated with the NAACP National Voter Fund, John Kerry for President, Democratic National Committee Asian American Leadership Council, Mike Honda for Congress, Friends of Hillary, CHC BOLD PAC, Akaka for US Senate, Xavier Becerra for Congress, Mazie Hirono for Congress, Honda for Congress, America’s Opportunity Fund, Asian American Action (AAA) Fund and Young Democrats of America to raise millions of dollars to empower communities of color.

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Throughout her career, Madalene has been a featured speaker or trainer at many conferences and trainings including the American Medical Association (AMA), the Center for Asian Pacific American Women, Virginia Leadership Institute, Netroots Nation, Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership (CAPAL), and numerous other organizations and non-profits.

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She has spent her entire professional political career working to bring diversity to the political process and nurturing candidates and staff as they move forward in bringing political change. The Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce awarded Ms. Mielke with its National Community Service award for her work in mentoring and promoting Vietnamese American civic participation.

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Madalene is a proud graduate of Tulane University, Newcomb College. She serves as a mentor through a variety of collegiate mentoring programs including the Newcomb College Institute Women to Women Mentoring Program and Georgetown University’s Politics Mentorship Program.

https://www.apaics.org

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Boo Yuen, co-founder and executive vice president of the Adwell Group, is an expert ad maker and strategist. 

Boo credits comedy as his entry into campaigns. While in school, Boo wrote for his college satire magazine, where he got his first unusual experience with campaigns, helping to run two different satirical candidates for student government president, one of whom won the election.

Boo started his transition from humorous to serious campaigns as an intern for one of the country’s leading democratic media firms. Over the course of four cycles at the firm, Boo rose from coffee delivery extraordinaire to award winning ad-maker and strategist. 

On the creative side, Boo has written, directed, or produced over 400 TV, radio, digital, and print ads for political campaigns, non-profits, and corporate clients. Regardless of a project’s budget, Boo has and will do anything and everything to execute some of the industry’s most ambitious creative. As a producer, he’s wrangled birds, sourced 1960’s era film stock, and even gotten his hair cut to secure a shoot location. 

While Boo is known for developing eye-catching creative, his work as an ad maker and strategist is not just for show; it translates to wins. Boo is an expert at incorporating local details into persuasive communications that help win elections. Some of Boo’s work highlights include helping re-elect Rep. Andy Kim, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, Rep. Jennifer Wexton, and over a dozen wins with the DCCC IE and HMP IE. 

In addition to helping elect candidates to office, Boo has also worked with companies and issue advocacy groups to craft successful ad campaigns. This work has included producing the corporate values video that kicked off a national brand campaign for a multinational beverage company and an ad campaign supporting the LA Clippers move to Inglewood. 

In 2022, Boo was honored as a winner of the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) 40 under 40 award. He is a graduate of Georgetown University with a degree in Government. 

https://www.adwell.com/about

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Betsy Lin is a national strategist working at the intersection of politics, advocacy and campaigns. As the founder of beelinning strategies, Betsy leverages her over two decades of experience across the Senate, federal campaigns, and multi-million dollar organizations to help her clients craft strategic plans and drive high-impact results.

Betsy served as Chief of Staff to United States Senator Mazie Hirono after running her historic race to be the first woman to represent the state of Hawaii and first Asian American and first immigrant woman to serve in the role of United States Senator. Betsy herself was the only Asian American female chief to serve during her seven years in the Senate, positioning the Senator throughout her term as a leader on comprehensive immigration reform, women’s rights, and as a conscientious voice on US military engagement in the foreign policy space. Betsy spent the first five years traveling between Washington DC and the state, helping the Senator enact her campaign promises and building out her profile with press and constituents across all 8 islands. In Washington DC, Betsy managed the high stakes relationships with other Members of Congress, DC and Hawaii based stakeholders and built out one of the top three diverse offices in the US Senate. 

https://beelinningstrategies.com

Betsy's podcast, Confessions of A Bad Asian,  available on Apple and Spotify:

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Or chip in $10, $20, or $50 to the Ronin Project PAC to help elect pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-clean energy, and pro-diversity Asian American candidates for local, state, and federal offices at this link

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Manjusha Kulkarni is the Executive Director of AAPI Equity Alliance, which serves and represents the 1.6 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County. 

In March 2020, Manju co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, the nation’s leading aggregator of COVID-19-related hate incidents against AAPIs.

Alongside fellow Stop AAPI Hate co-founders Cynthia Choi and Russell Jeung, Manju has been recognized as an honoree of the prestigious TIME100 Most Influential People and Bloomberg 50 lists, and as a recipient of the 2021 Webby Social Movement of the Year award. 

More recently, she was awarded a spot on the 2022 Forbes 50 Over 50 list for her leadership in advancing the Stop AAPI Hate movement. 

Manju’s work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR and CNN, as well as in numerous local and ethnic media outlets. As part of her advocacy work on behalf of AAPI communities, Manju has shared her expertise with countless individuals and entities including the Aspen Institute, the World Bank and the United Nations.

Manju serves on the Board of Directors of LA Voice and is a member of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission and the California Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board. 

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Sara Sadhwani is an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College, specializing in American politics and race and ethnic politics, and a commissioner on the 2020 California Citizens Redistricting Commission. She is also serving as a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. 

Her research examines voting behavior, elections, voting rights, public opinion, public policy, and interest groups, with an emphasis on the representation of racial, ethnic and immigrant communities.

She has been published in the Journal of Politics,  Political Behavior,  Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Politics, Groups and Identities, and Perspectives on Politics. 

She earned her doctorate in political science from the University of Southern California and was the recipient of the Haynes-Lindley Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation.

She holds appointments as a senior researcher at AAPI Data, a member of the executive council for the Western Political Science Association, and a faculty fellow at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy.

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James Santa Maria brings more than 20 years of government, political, and public affairs experience to The Santa Maria Group. 

James specializes in local government, focusing on the City and County of Los Angeles as well as other municipalities and public agencies throughout Southern California.

James founded the Santa Maria Group following a ten-year career in Los Angeles City government as chief of staff to two former City Council Members. He also served as a Deputy to Mayor Richard Riordan. 

James also worked collaboratively on several key public- private partnerships with many developers that have brought commercial, industrial and mixed-use projects throughout Los Angeles.

James has delivered on government procurement and contracting opportunities with the City and County agencies including Public Works, LA Unified School District, LA Department of Water and Power, LA and Long Beach Ports, and the Los Angeles World Airport. 

James also was the senior advisor on a wide range of issues from local district-focused community relations to issues of citywide importance such as the creation of the Housing Trust Fund, business tax reform, public safety and the City of Los Angeles’ $5 billion annual budget. 

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