We build coalitions no one expected to advance goals Americans share.
Unlikely Majorities runs campaigns that make the politically and culturally impossible possible.
We help mission-driven companies, trade associations, investors, coalitions, and civic leaders translate ideas across value systems, build genuine support with unexpected allies, and achieve big objectives in policy, media, markets, and culture.
Our work
America’s loudest fights obscure a quiet truth: most people share the same hopes.
Ask Americans across political divides what they want for their kids, and the answers sound familiar: decent work and housing, clean air and water, healthy food, time with family, safe communities, trustworthy institutions, and technology that serves human well-being rather than merely the profits of a few. In a fractured America, there is surprising consensus on the issues that matter.
Conventional communications and lobbying firms sharpen the message and make the policy ask, but they work within the political landscape as it exists.
We do something further: we change the operating environment.
We build cross-partisan and cross-cultural permission structures, the credible people, trusted institutions, and shared language that allow someone to support a solution without feeling they have crossed a political or cultural line.
In practice, this might mean helping conservative homeowners see clean energy as a matter of property rights. It might mean bringing progressives to support a free-market policy that increases growth and opportunities for labor. It might mean connecting health-conscious conservatives, red-state farmers, and environmental advocates around cleaner food, soil, air, and water.
We build trust and turn it into action.
How we work
Most bridge-building efforts settle for compromise at the lowest common denominator. We build practical alliances that serve mutual values aimed at people’s highest aspirations. We then mobilize policy, media, investment, and the public interest to make those aspirations real.
01
Find the opening.
We do our homework, including tools like polling, focus groups, and landscape research, to learn where authentic support already exists, what concerns must be addressed, and where there are zones of potential agreement.
02
Build the argument.
We develop language and narratives that travel across political, cultural, and institutional boundaries without asking people to abandon their principles.
03
Assemble the coalition.
We identify people and institutions with a real stake in the outcome, bring them in early, and build trust among partners who do not usually work together.
04
Turn alignment into action
We move audiences and issues through the channels that matter: media, legislation, appropriations, regulation, market adoption, industry standards, investment, and public will.
Our offerings
Coalition Building, Stakeholder Mapping, and Partner Engagement
Market Adoption and Political Permission Strategy
Legislative, Regulatory, and Appropriations Strategy
Polling, Focus Groups, and Message Testing
Narrative, Messaging, and Communications Strategy
Trade Association, Industry, and Portfolio-Wide Strategy
Media Campaigns, Writing, and Executive Thought Leadership
Podcasts and Creator Campaigns
Strategic Retreats and Convenings
Insights
Our work featured in:
Who we help
Partners whose goals require more than conventional politics.
Startups and innovative companies.
We build the market, community, and political support companies need to scale responsibly.
Trade associations and industry coalitions.
We expand the coalition, sharpen the public-benefit case, and run integrated policy and reputation campaigns.
Investors, family offices, and VC firms.
We solve shared policy, market, and trust challenges across portfolios through research, narrative, partnerships, and public-affairs strategy.
Public-interest coalitions and funders.
We broaden the base, change the political math, and open new paths to impact.
Our experience
What changed when the coalition changed.
Across our careers, we have helped move issues that conventional politics left stuck. In each case, we identified the obstacle, built an unexpected coalition, and turned alignment into a concrete result.
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Changed the politics of election security
Obstacle. Senate Republican leaders opposed additional federal election-security funding on states’ rights grounds.
Intervention. We enlisted nationally prominent conservative voices to frame defense from foreign interference as a national-security responsibility consistent with conservative principles.
Result. Senate Republicans backed more than $200 million in additional federal appropriations for election cybersecurity.
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Brought advanced manufacturing to a hard-hit region
Obstacle. A region struggling with industrial decline was competing against institutions such as MIT and Georgia Tech for a major federal manufacturing investment.
Intervention. We assembled universities, businesses, and civic leaders across Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh behind a unified regional proposal.
Result. The region won America Makes, an $85 million public-private additive-manufacturing institute that helped Youngstown build a new economic identity.
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United left and right on food and environmental health
Obstacle. Food, chemical exposure, and environmental health had become divided into competing partisan camps.
Intervention. We helped build a coalition of MAHA leaders and parents, environmental organizations, nutrition advocates, and soil-health groups, then carried a shared argument through conservative and progressive media.
Result. The effort helped spur EPA action on microplastics and a bipartisan House vote to remove a pesticide-liability shield from the 2026 Farm Bill.
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Built bipartisan support for semiconductor investment
Obstacle. Rebuilding domestic semiconductor manufacturing required support across party, business, labor, and community lines.
Intervention. We rallied Ohio Republicans, business leaders, workers, and local stakeholders behind federal investment through the CHIPS Act.
Result. The coalition helped build support for the legislation, and Ohio later secured a major Intel project expected to create thousands of jobs.
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Defended the rooftop-solar market
Obstacle. A deceptively worded Florida constitutional amendment threatened to severely restrict rooftop solar.
Intervention. We organized libertarians, Tea Party leaders, conservative homeowners, civil-rights groups, environmental advocates, and solar businesses around property rights, consumer choice, fair access, and competition.
Result. The amendment failed, protecting the market and establishing a cross-partisan case for rooftop solar.
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Broadened the coalition for the Child Tax Credit
Obstacle. An expanded Child Tax Credit was stuck in partisan debate and framed as a one-party priority.
Intervention. We helped bring evangelical and pro-life organizations together with progressive economic advocates around a shared commitment to families and children.
Result. The wider coalition changed the political math and broadened support for the policy.
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Additional experience
Veterans’ health: When emerging approaches to trauma recovery faced institutional resistance, we joined veterans and lawmakers across parties to advance mindfulness and complementary care through the VA.
Jobs in the Mahoning Valley: As the region absorbed major manufacturing losses, we worked across the aisle with local Republican leaders to help bring a HomeGoods distribution center and roughly 1,000 jobs to the community.
Fiscal discipline and national security: When defense reform divided left and right, we united Republican budget hawks and progressive peace advocates around Pentagon savings and ending forever wars.
Our client criteria
We work with mission-driven and innovative companies, founders, investors and VC firms, trade associations, industry coalitions, foundations, civic organizations, public-interest campaigns, and leaders whose goals require more than conventional politics.
We are highly selective about the work we take on.
We partner with organizations whose products, investments, or policy goals can credibly advance priorities Americans share: good jobs and housing, healthy food and soil, clean air and water, safe communities, strong domestic high-wage job creation and training, responsible innovation, trustworthy public institutions, and technology that serves the public good.
We don’t manufacture support or ask communities to endorse an agenda they don’t share. We look for genuine alignment, bring partners in early, and expect clients to listen as well as persuade.
Some challenges cannot be solved by one cultural or political faction. Some new ideas cannot move through the old coalitions. Some opportunities require new paradigms.
Team
A team built to translate across the lines that usually divide.
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Founding Partner
Tim Ryan represented Northeast Ohio in the U.S. House of Representatives for 20 years, serving on the House Appropriations Committee and as co-chair of the Congressional Manufacturing Caucus. He has spent his career building bridges to advance policy, public investment, business, labor, and community leadership around American manufacturing, energy, veterans’ health, food, and the future of working communities.
A former presidential candidate and his party’s 2022 nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, Tim understands how an argument travels from a company or community to a committee room, a newsroom, and the public. At Unlikely Majorities, he helps companies, trade associations, investors, and coalitions build support among workers, communities, policymakers, and unexpected allies. He is the author of A Mindful Nation and The Real Food Revolution.
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Founding Partner
Justin Talbot Zorn is an author, adviser, and policymaker who has built high-impact coalitions across left, right, and center on issues spanning food, health, conservation, democracy, and innovation.
As legislative director to three members of Congress, he developed a unique niche: designing legislative measures that could pass with support from some of the most conservative and most progressive lawmakers. As a political strategist and an adviser to startups and think tanks, his work has helped advance bipartisan action on healthy food and soil, rooftop solar, federal innovation and election-cybersecurity investment, the child tax credit, ending forever wars, and environmental health.
A Harvard- and Oxford-trained specialist in public policy and the psychology of human wellbeing, he has written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, TIME, Newsweek, CNN, and Foreign Policy. His first book, Golden, was translated into fourteen languages.
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Managing Director
Mark Wax leads operations and client engagement, turning senior strategy into executable campaigns, clear workplans, partner coordination, and reliable delivery.
He has built a career in nonprofit leadership and strategic consulting, with roles at leading public-policy coalitions focused on food policy and environmental health, as well as organizations including Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, Mindful Schools, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and Catholic Charities. His experience across contemplative practice, social-emotional learning, social services, and publishing brings operational discipline, careful facilitation, and mission-first judgment to Unlikely Majorities.
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Director of Business Development and Partnerships
Ashleigh Jacubec leads business development, partnerships, and finance at Unlikely Majorities. She cultivates client and partner relationships, oversees the firm’s finances, and ensures new commitments and strategic initiatives move forward reliably.
She comes from a background in merchandising and brand strategy at a Fortune 500 consumer company, where she helped launch a new brand and led cross-functional initiatives spanning merchandising, marketing, product development, and brand strategy. She worked across diverse teams to bring new concepts to market, manage complex initiatives, and drive execution from strategy through launch.
Contact
Bring us a challenge the typical playbook can’t solve.
To discuss a campaign, coalition, portfolio-wide challenge, or high-stakes strategic issue: