Steve Rosenthal

Steven Rosenthal (born January 21, 1953), is a longtime labor and political strategist based in Washington, DC. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in a union household. The New York Times has described Rosenthal as one of the Democratic Party's “smartest and most influential strategists”.

In 2003, Rosenthal was one of the founders and Chief Executive Officer of America Coming Together (ACT), a voter mobilization project aimed at defeating incumbent Republican president George W. Bush. ACT raised and spent over $142 million and built one of the largest voter mobilization campaigns in Democratic history. In a 2004 Washington Post article about Steve Rosenthal's leadership of ACT, Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s former campaign manager, was quoted praising Rosenthal by saying, “He's the last great hope of the Democratic Party." Charlie Cook described ACT’s work in the National Journal: “Democrats, chiefly through America Coming Together, mounted what was not only the most sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation in the party’s history, but it was probably the best field work by a factor of at least 10.”

In his seven year tenure as political director of the AFL-CIO, Rosenthal designed and directed Labor ‘96, Labor ‘98, Labor 2000 and Labor 2002 which was the Labor Movement’s unified grassroots mobilization effort. Business week published an article in 1996 about Rosenthal’s effectiveness as a labor strategist asserting that Steve Rosenthal “has injected a new sense of urgency into the AFL-CIO's rusty political machine by pulling together its far-flung operations into a coordinated national effort.” Upon leaving his post at the AFL-CIO, the New York Times reported that, “Many union leaders give Mr. Rosenthal credit for transforming organized labor’s feeble, forgettable campaign operation into one that many political analysts say is the most effective in the nation.”