Jesús Rodríguez writes:

One recent Sunday in August, Daysi González addressed a crowd of about seventy people in a sterile conference room in New York’s financial district. The people who were gathered at tables around her, eating buffet tacos and sipping cans of Coke Zero, were first- and second-generation Americans getting ready to run for office or to work on political campaigns. Some looked younger than thirty and were dressed casually, while others already looked the part of the candidate, in suits or high heels. González, a political consultant who’d come in from D.C., was there to give a seminar on mail—specifically, the postcards that get stuffed into mailboxes every campaign season. “People have to look at it,” González told the group. “Even if it’s just, you know, their mailbox to the recycling bin—they have to look.”

In an age of YouTube ads and paid political-content creators, the notion might seem quaint. But González, who’s thirty-one, has made it her job to figure out how to use the mail to help elect Democrats. On a projected slide deck, she flipped through examples of mailers that she and her firm had worked on: there was the familiar ALEXANDRIA ¡OCASIO! CORTEZ logo, a lotería-themed postcard that read “VOTE FOR OUR COMMUNITY, VOTE FOR RUBEN GALLEGO,” and another one, paid for by the Dolores Huerta Foundation and decorated with Día de los Muertos imagery, that read “VOTA PALOOZA.” González knows the rules of the game, and shared some loopholes that she’s learned along the way—for instance, that political-action committees cannot coördinate with campaigns, but that campaigns can post information, in hard-to-find corners of their websites, about what kind of advertising they happen to need help with. After González concluded her talk, an attendee asked about something she had mentioned earlier—that she was Salvadoran, and living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” the person said. González, seeming impassive, said, “It’ll work out how it needs to.”

González is one of an estimated two hundred thousand Salvadorans whose legal immigration status is set to expire on September 9th, and one of about a million immigrants in the widening gyre of the Trump Administration’s delegalization drive. For González, who has lived in the U.S. nearly her entire life, the date is a brick wall of a deadline. “That’s when I sell my house, I sell my car, I buy a ticket, I pack everything I own, I get rid of everything I can’t take with me,” she told me.

Unlike most immigrants in America, González has a job that puts her in rooms with powerful people. As a partner at the consulting firm Solidarity Strategies, she tries to help Democrats win some of the most consequential races in the country, including James Talarico’s campaign for Senate, but also smaller names in red districts trying to flip the House. Her biggest client this cycle is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has paid her firm more than a hundred and eighty thousand dollars this year, according to the Federal Election Commission. She’s grown friendly with Tony Cárdenas, a client and former congressman from California, who officiated the wedding of her mentor and boss, the political consultant Chuck Rocha. After the seminar, González returned a missed call from Cárdenas, who’d inquired about a New Yorker reporter asking to speak to him. “If you’d be willing to talk to him, there’s nothing I’m really avoiding,” she told Cárdenas in a voice mail. She turned to me: “He probably doesn’t want to say the wrong thing.”

González is introverted, but comes across as warm and cheerful. She smiles while she talks, except when she’s on the verge of tears. [Continue reading…]