Mike Lux is the co-founder and President of Progressive Strategies. Since starting the company, Mike has launched a number of important projects, including American Family Voices, an issue advocacy group working on pocketbook issues for American families; and the Progressive Donor Network, which works to coordinate a network of individual donors, issue advocacy groups, and top flight political consultants and strategists.

Mike’s recent projects have garnered a considerable amount of media coverage in The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, National Journal, The New Republic and Miami Herald, and have provoked numerous attacks by Rush Limbaugh and other right wing media figures, as well as an “expose” by William Buckley’s National Review Magazine. He has been featured on CNN, the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, and has been on many national and regional radio shows. Mike is also a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post.

In addition to those projects, Mike currently serves on the boards of several important organizations, including the Arca Foundation, Americans United For Change, Center for Progressive Leadership, and Progressive Majority, the last three of which he co-founded. He also was a co-founder of Ballot Initiative Strategy Center and Women’s Voices/Women Vote, has served on several other boards throughout his career, and played a role in helping launch the Center for American Progress and Air America.

In the late 1990’s, Mike was Senior Vice President for Political Action at People For the American Way (PFAW), and the PFAW Foundation. He oversaw lobbying and legal advocacy, field operations, state and regional offices, voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. He helped launch the PFAW PAC and the PFAW Voters Alliance in 1997. He was also responsible for coalition building with other organizations and interest groups.

Before joining People For the American Way, from January 1993 to mid-1995, Mike served in as a Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison in the White House, where his role on health care and budget issues involved working closely with a wide range of constituency groups including labor, seniors, churches, disability groups, businesses, health care providers, trial lawyers, consumer groups and farm groups. He organized the first clergy breakfast, the first state opinion leader’s days, and the first bill signing ceremony of the Clinton presidency. Lux served in the 1992 campaign war room, the 1993 budget war room and the 1994 health care war room (being one of only two people to serve in all three); and was the person who organized the coalition to fight the school lunch cuts the Republicans were pushing in 1995, the first issue they were soundly defeated on after taking control of Congress.

Prior to his service at the White House, Mike served as Constituency Director on both the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and the presidential transition team. In the 1988 cycle, Mike was a member of the senior staff for the Biden and Simon presidential campaigns. In the 1984 cycle, he played a major volunteer role in the Iowa Mondale campaign.

With a diverse breadth of experience, Mike has an extensive background in the consulting, labor and consumer advocacy worlds. He was a partner and cofounder of the Chicago-based political consulting firm, The Strategy Group; served as Executive Vice President, PAC director and chief lobbyist for the Iowa AFL-CIO in the early 1990s; and worked as Executive Director of the Iowa Citizen Action Network.

In July of 2007, Mike Lux launched OpenLeft.com with prominent bloggers Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers. OpenLeft.com is a news, analysis and action website dedicated toward building a progressive governing majority in America. OpenLeft.com connects establishment progressive groups with outsider activists in conversations and a variety of projects to build a progressive governing majority and furthering progressive policy.

In November of 2008, Mike was named to the Obama-Biden Transition Team. In that role, he served as an advisor to the Office of Public Liaison on working with the progressive community.

On January 14^th, Mike released his first book, UThe Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to BeU, in bookstores and online nationwide.

Mike Lux is a proud native of Lincoln, Nebraska, where most of his family still lives. He is married to Barbara Laur.

To view Mike’s Wikipedia page, click here.