Bradley Tusk

The vast majority of Americans would say that we should neither confiscate everyone's guns, but nor should it be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle.

But the problem is, those Americans, the people in the center, the people in the middle, they don't vote in primaries.

So politicians ignore their views and cater only to the extremes.

And when the next school shooting happens, and it will happen, all of us are going to bang our heads against the wall and say, why can't our politicians just do the right thing for once?

Why?

I'll tell you why.

Because they're held hostage by the extremes.

They're stuck.

We have to free them from their clutches.

We have to make it possible for them to move back to the middle.

And the only way to do that is to get a lot more people voting, and the only way to do that is to meet the people where they are, on their phones.

About a decade or so ago, I helped run a lot of the campaigns around the US to legalize Uber.

And I know that now, when you guys think of Uber, it's this giant corporation, but back then, we were a tiny little tech startup, and taxi was this big, politically powerful industry who really didn't like us.

And we knew we couldn't out-muscle them, and so instead, we turned to the people.

And by making it possible for our customers to tell their elected officials, hey, I like this Uber thing, please leave it alone, we were able to mobilize millions of people through the app to advocate on our behalf.

And when mayors and city council members started hearing from thousands of their constituents, that's exactly what they did.

They left Uber alone.

That's how we won in basically every market in the country.

And while this was happening, I just remember sitting there thinking, God bless these people, they're making my job a lot easier, but my guess is they don't know who their city council member is, they don't vote in state senate primaries, and you know, why would they?

They're busy, they have kids, they have jobs, they have lives.