Jacqueline Salit TOPICS: Politics Social Issues Media/Broadcast/Print FEE CATEGORY:* 5.0k to 10.0k TRAVELS FROM: New York Profile Program Outlines Request This Speaker

Jacqueline Salit: Profile

Jacqueline Salit is a principal spokesperson and political analyst for the independent movement. Talker’s Magazine called her “one of the nation’s leading and most articulate experts on third party and independent politics.” Ms. Salit occupies a unique location among America’s social and political commentators.

As a strategist, speechwriter and media consultant, Salit provides a firsthand account of the developments and changes in the independent movement for democracy and reform. As a speaker, she is penetrating and witty as she engages her audiences’ common experience of the political process.

Salit consults with dozens of associations of independent voters throughout the country, including Independent Texans, which recently played a role in winning over Carol Strayhorn, State Comptroller and the highest vote-getting Republican in Texas, to running as an independent candidate for Governor. Salit is the Independence Party’s liaison to the office of the mayor of New York City. In 2005 she helped orchestrate a strategy which produced 47% of African American voters supporting the independent/Republican Michael Bloomberg for mayor — a historical voting shift which established a new alliance between black and independent voters.

Salit’s analyses have been published in many newspapers including USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Legal Times, Buffalo News, Albany Times Union, Newsday and the Washington Times. She’s been a commentator on CNN, CNBC and hundreds of political talk radio programs around the country.

Salit is Executive Editor of the Neo-Independent, a magazine for independents which is now in its third year of publication. In its preview of the magazine, The Los Angeles Times wrote: “Salit and Co. think ‘it’s time for the independent movement to be part of the political conversation in America’ … I agree. The country has become simultaneously polarized and petrified.”

Born in 1953 in New York City, Ms. Salit grew up in a Jewish family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied writing, before taking a job at ABC Network News. She began by covering the Democratic and Republican party conventions, and rose through the ranks to the position of Associate Producer at ABC, where she was part of the original team of “AM America,” which later became “Good Morning America.” Salit left ABC in 1975 to join the efforts to unionize welfare recipients citywide in New York and become a legal advocate for the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council.

In 1994, Salit invested her 15 years of political experience and founded the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, the nation’s leading think tank and activist center for independents. CUIP is currently a thriving non-profit organization.

Salit is the chief strategist for many of CUIP’s principal projects, including a national legislative and lobbying effort to introduce nonpartisan political reform at the state and federal levels throughout the country. This campaign introduces such political reform measures as same day voter registration, term limits, initiative and referendum, ballot access, campaign finance reform and inclusive debates as key to empowering voters, and creating a level playing field.

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