Contributor

Erik Ose

Activist and political blogger at LatestOutrage.org

Erik Ose is a writer and political activist. His columns have appeared in North Carolina newspapers such as The News & Observer, and elsewhere including The Hill and Salon.com. He authors The Latest Outrage blog and is one of the curators of JoeHerzenberg.org, a site about the life of the first openly gay elected official in the former Confederacy. He lives in Chapel Hill, NC and can be reached at thelatestoutrage@gmail.com.

He is a long time grassroots community organizer, and veteran of several large scale voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns. In 1990, Erik co-founded Musicians Organized for Voter Education (MOVE), a NC-based youth voter outreach project that became one of the inspirations for Rock The Vote. Subsequent voter registration drives he coordinated for the 1992 and 1996 elections added over 25,000 young voters to the rolls in North Carolina.

In 1996 he served as Director of the NC Participatory Democracy Project, an independent PAC dedicated to increasing progressive voter turnout for the Gantt-Helms U.S. Senate race. In 2004, he ran a record-breaking voter registration campaign that resulted in more than one-quarter of all the new voters registered statewide by the NC Democratic Party. From 2004-06 he was Campaign Mobilizer for the Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina, organizing citizens in economic justice advocacy campaigns against predatory lenders, incompetent national bank regulators, and corporations peddling tax refund loans.

In 2008, he co-founded Voters for Obama, a grassroots group whose website launched on President's Day (Feb. 19) and helped voters from around the country generate an estimated several thousand e-mails and phone calls to Democratic superdelegates urging them to support Barack Obama. Volunteers gathered thousands more signatures on petitions to superdelegates in seven states and registered new voters for the primary and general elections in North Carolina.