Revenge of America's Unemployed

Revenge of America’s Unemployed captures the shifting mood of the unemployed, underemployed and uncounted. More than 30 million Americans lost their jobs, saw their pay slashed or left the workforce during the Great Recession. Many lost their homes, marriages, savings, self-esteem and self-confidence and, finally, their patience with a political elite that could not deliver on their promises of jobs, jobs, jobs. This book chronicles the passions that fueled the greatest upset in modern presidential history. Having listened to their stories and read their Facebook posts, tracked their angst and anger in surveys and exit polls, Rick Sloan knew how politically volatile these men and women were. They had swung from hope to hopelessness for too long. Far too many were prepared to turn their backs on a political party they felt had abandoned them. To those callously excluded from the Democrat’s ‘rising American electorate’ strategy, 2016 was payback time. Revenge of America’s Unemployed is a must read for those who want to understand why lost. It also offers strategic insights to those determined to defeat in 2020.

Rick Sloan is a thoughtful, provocative strategist with a rare genius for drawing large insights from the smallest details of America’s electoral past. At the height of the Great Recession, he created and then led the Union of Unemployed (nicknamed UCubed) until his retirement. Launched in early 2010, his virtual union grew to 450,000 Facebook activists by 2015, engaged 15 million users and reached 213 million fans and their friends that year. Its Facebook-centric campaigns in 2010, 2012, and 2014 used animated cartoons to skewer Republicans and their Tea Party allies. In early 2016, its memes, posts and videos offered a useful perspective on politics for the jobless … and a unique Get Out The Vote strategy for a presidential campaign. Sloan’s career spans four decades and eleven presidential campaigns, two stints on Capitol Hill as Chief of Staff to the late Senator Howard Metzenbaum from Ohio and then Michigan Congressman John Dingell, his own campaign against then Ohio Congressman John Kasich in 1984, and nearly 30 years working for (and with) progressive labor unions. He is the author of "The Gift of Strategy". Published in 1995, the book urged Democrats to focus on a Steel and Seaboard Strategy, deepening the party’s ties to the industrial Midwest and the coasts, and to the and new Democrats who lived there. Sloan was instrumental in securing the International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton in August 2008. Four years later, he was asked to work with her speechwriter on unemployment and labor issues. When Secretary announced her presidential campaign in 2015, the Union of Unemployed endorsed her candidacy and created an I LIKE HILLARY campaign that engaged 1.2 million Facebook activists and reached 9.7 million of their friends. As a micro-Super PAC, UCubed targeted 90,000 unlikely voters among working class Democrats in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada; its Burma Shave-style ad campaign featured crying diaper babies ads and drove up turnout in their primaries and caucuses. Sloan also created a ‘red team strategy’ for the Clinton campaign’s chairman, John Podesta, that demonstrated how Donald Trump could pick the Democrat’s so-called lock on the Electoral College. Sloan’s advocacy for a sharper focus on the unemployed and working class Democrats involved him in the vice presidential selection process and drafts of the Democratic Party platform language on an infrastructure bank. Rick Sloan was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. and J.D degrees from The Ohio State University. He now lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Katrinka Smith Sloan. Their three adult children, Christopher, Jennifer and Moria, are pursuing careers in pubic policy and public health.