Alumni Spotlight

Mara Vanderslice

A Rising Star of the Christian Left

Mara Vanderslice '97 with Senator John Kerry.

When the Democratic Party won big in last year’s election, a handful of newly elected Democrats could link their victories to a newfound success in attracting religious voters. In several high profile races, much of the credit for those gains goes to Mara Vanderslice ’97.

Vanderslice is founder of Common Good Strategies, a political consulting firm that led successful outreach efforts to evangelical Christians and churchgoing Catholics on behalf of candidates in Kansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan during last year’s elections. All seven of the candidates that Vanderslice worked with won their elections, and those candidates did at least 10 percent better than the national average with voters who attend church weekly.

“So much of our work was done quietly, behind the scenes,” says Vanderslice in a recent telephone interview. She participated in “listening meetings” with hundreds of religious leaders in order to find out what issues were important to them. Many church leaders said they did not want to be viewed as Republican Party partisans.

“They said, ‘where have you been,’” Vanderslice recalls. “I was floored by the fact that these pastors and lay leaders had never before been contacted by Democrats, and they wanted to be. Religious people are interested in more than just abortion and gay marriage. Issues like poverty, the war in Iraq and global climate change really resonate with them. The results of this election show that people of faith are interested in more than just one or two issues.”

Vanderslice is a case in point. She grew up in a spiritual but not religious and politically progressive home in Boulder, Co. She allows that she was “very idealistic and committed to issues of social justice” when she arrived at Earlham, but also distrustful of Christianity. Her classes in Peace and Global Studies and a semester abroad in Bogotá, Colombia solidified her interest addressing the problems of the developing world. But her years at Earlham also introduced her to the gospels and strands of Christianity that she found deeply appealing.

“One of the most important things about my Earlham experience is that I was opened up to a kind of Christianity that I had never experienced before,” she says, relating how she was “born again” during a on-campus meeting for worship. “I discovered a Jesus that stood with women, the poor and those on the margins in such a radical way. I fell in love with that.”

After Earlham, Vanderslice interned at Sojourners, a liberal evangelical magazine, and then worked at Jubilee USA Network, a faith-based effort to secure debt cancellation for some of the world’s poorest countries. It was not until the run-up to the 2004 Presidential Campaign that Vanderslice decided that she wanted a role inside the political process.

“It became imminently clear to me how important it is who is sitting in the seats of power,” she said. “Our elected officials have a disportionate influence on the lives of people around the world. I decided that I needed to play a role in getting people who shared my moral values into positions of power.”

She worked for Howard Dean’s campaign during the Iowa primary and later served as director of religious outreach for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Soon after she was hired, however, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights issued a press release painting her as an extreme leftist, and her role in the campaign was marginalized.

“It was devastating at the time,” she admits, “But I think that whomever had been in my position would have been attacked by the right. It would have been easy to say, ‘this is too hard’ and to move on to another type of work, but I stuck with it.”

During the final weeks of the 2004 campaign, she led a successful outreach effort to Catholic voters in Michigan. (One effective strategy: having nuns call Catholic voters and introduce themselves as, “this is Sister Mary, and I support John Kerry.”) After her success in Michigan, she believed that she had something to contribute to future campaigns. She started her consulting firm two years ago, and when all of her clients won in 2006, she gained national attention and The New York Times called her a “rising star” in the Democratic Party.

Vanderslice says that she and her business partner, Eric Sapp, are not picking favorites among her party’s 2008 presidential hopefuls. Not yet, anyway. But it is lost on no one that her successful clients in 2006 included winners of key offices in so-called “battleground states” like Ted Strickland (the first Democratic governor in Ohio in 16 years), Senator Bob Casey (who defeated Rick Santorum, one of the country’s highest profile religious conservatives, in Pennsylvania) and Jennifer Granholm, who won re-election as governor of Michigan.

“The bottom line is that candidates should not do something that is inauthentic to who they are, but they can talk about issues in terms of their own morality, values and faith,” says Vanderslice. “A lot of people are skeptical about what we do and are worried that we somehow want to erode the separation between the church and the state, but that’s not what we’re about. We aren’t asking ministers to endorse candidates from the pulpit. Most of our work at Common Good Strategies is about reshaping communications and policy approaches within the party. The truth is, most of our candidates are people of faith. The key is for them to find effective ways to talk about that. If candidates can find ways to speak about issues in the context of their personal moral values, I think all democrats — whether or not they are people of faith — will be inspired again.”