General Consultant and Political Communicator

Bill Nasso (photo)

Bill Nasso

bnasso@gmail.com 908.625.8610

I only work on Democratic
and nonpartisan campaigns.

Bill Nasso grew up in the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna, New York – a steel city described in the 60s as the nation’s most ethnically diverse. Active in student government and campus media at SUNY Brockport, he double majored in speech and communications media as an undergrad and stayed to study political rhetoric on a graduate assistantship and teach critical thinking, purposeful writing and public speaking to undergraduates.

In 1982 he moved to Florida and became involved in Broward County Democratic politics. By the mid-80s he was editing the county party’s newsletter and running underdog campaigns and winning them against the odds. Several years later he joined in founding 21st Century Democrats to help South Florida Democrats adjust as the party and its voters moved toward the center and campaigns grew more sophisticated.

The Dukakis for President campaign hired Bill in 1987 to help organize its Florida headquarters opening. He was its initial press contact, helped advance candidate and surrogate appearances and created literature to support field operations. He was then tasked to manage the campaign’s presence at the three-day state party convention. A dawn-to-dusk focus on Mike Dukakis bio, record and platform led up to a high-energy conclusion to Dukakis’s convention speech which drew delegates off convention floor to a ‘Taste of Boston’ lunch with the candidate. Dukakis won a majority of delegate votes, earned hundreds of column-inches in newspapers across the state and won Florida’s primary before becoming the party’s nominee for President. Two years later legendary Democratic consultant Bob Shrum hired Bill to replicate Dukakis’s convention success for the George Stuart for Governor campaign.

After Dukakis won Florida’s primary Bill formed Politechnical Consultants to bring technology to down-ballot races. His computer-designed artwork applied eye-track and color research to capture attention, and persuasive rhetoric to move voters to act. He built a database of voters, enhanced it with history, geographic and demographic data, and used it to target voters in one of the earliest applications of microtargeting in politics. In its four years with Bill as principal consultant, nearly all of Politechnical’s clients enjoyed impressive wins – especially the underdogs.

In 1991 Bill relocated to North Carolina and continued working with Florida clients. Three years later – and after an unsuccessful run for office – he began working with Democrats in and around Raleigh. He helped build the North Carolina Democratic Party’s voter database for its 1994 coordinated campaign, recruited a mail shop, and oversaw its direct mailings.

Over the years, Bill has been the general consultant to municipal, judicial, school board, legislative, county and state campaigns in Florida, North Carolina, Texas and New Jersey. In 1997 he helped train Bosnian political activists in grassroots party development for the National Democratic Institute. He also advised several Liberal Democrat candidates during Great Britain’s parliamentary elections that same year. And in 2001 he graduated from the first Multimedia Bootcamp for Storytelling in UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In the mid-90s Bill became involved with addressing problems stemming from sprawling growth in the Raleigh-Durham area. He instigated the use of polling and focus group data to inform and influence decision-makers and political candidates. He also helped organize Triangle Growth Strategies as a 501(3)c organization to build stakeholder consensus on how to address the issue. In 2000 he researched and reported how overcrowding in Cary schools related to the projections for residential growth, school board policy, and county commission funding.

Understanding voters attitudes on growth and partisanship has helped Bill steer a number of Cary council and mayoral campaigns to decisive wins between 1997 and 2022. Once elected, these change agents redirected the town’s development. In the mid-1990’s Cary was a hot bed of anger over its sprawling residential development, traffic congestion, and lack of parks and public facilities. Today, Cary is a vibrant, diverse, green community where property taxes are low, people want to live and play, and retailers and job creators want to locate.

“Nothing has been more personally rewarding than playing a small part in the Town of Cary’s transformation.”– Bill

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Today, Bill lives in rural New Jersey with his wife, Patricia, and their three-year-old Great Pyrenees, Riley. In 2006 he gained valuable insight into electoral politics in predominantly Republican Hunterdon County, NJ, working on several municipal and countywide Democratic campaigns. In 2024, he volunteered in both Sue Altman’s NJ’s 7th Congressional District campaign and the PA Dems’ Harris-Walz campaign and was senior advisor in the final weeks of Santos Limon’s 23rd Congressional District race in Texas’ Rio Grande valley.

Undaunted by partisan adversity, Bill remains an optimist with a keen interest in persuasive media and electoral politics. He is always looking for qualified, left-leaning candidates he can help get elected.