Rajan Narang is a political action committee (PAC) advisor and nonprofit administrator who works as a senior advisor at Stand Up America, a left-of-center advocacy group founded in 2016 to oppose the election of Donald Trump by supporting theories that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 election and organizing support for then-President Trump’s later impeachment. ^{1 2}

Narang is a longtime Democratic and left-of-center operative who volunteered to support the Affordable Care Act’s passage, worked for then-President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, and worked as executive director of the State Democracy Project. ^{3 4 5 6}

Education and Background

Rajan Narang received his Bachelor of Arts (B.A) in government from Georgetown University in 2012. After graduating, he was a field organizer for then-President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in Las Vegas before becoming a state legislative campaign manager in Virginia. He returned to the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service and earned a Master of Arts (M.A) in Security Studies in 2015. ^{7 8}

Since graduating, Narang has worked at several left-leaning advocacy organizations and nonprofits involved in election administration and campaign finance policy. Narang worked as the director of state and local campaigns at End Citizens United, a Democratic-aligned political action committee that endorses political candidates who promise to overturn the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, a case in which the Court held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment. ⁹ Narang also worked at Let America Vote, a left-wing political action committee that seeks to defeat politicians hostile to left-of-center voting procedure priorities. ¹⁰

From 2020 to 2022, Narang was the executive director of the State Democracy Project, a nonprofit organization that serves as an active fiscal sponsor of left-of-center voter mobilization groups. It also disburses grants to existing left-of-center organizations that seek to relax voter laws that ensure secure elections. ^{11 12} Narang sits on the board of the State Democracy Project as of August 2024. ¹³

In 2022, he started his own consulting business, Shakti Campaigns, where he expands left-of-center election and campaign advocacy networks across state and local levels. Narang is also a senior director of states at the Pro-Democracy Center and Pro-Democracy Campaign, where he provides similar nonprofit and campaign consulting. ¹⁴

The Forge Op-ed

In a 2020 opinion piece in The Forge, Narang and fellow State Democracy Project board member Dan Cantor argued that long voting lines outside a Milwaukee voting precinct were analogous to Jim Crow, the laws enforced in the late 19th and early 20th century in the American South to maintain racial segregation and discrimination against Black citizens. Narang and Cantor wrote that “Mr. Jim Crow would have been proud” of the “long lines, primarily of Black people” waiting to vote. “The truth” of the matter, according to Narang and Cantor, was that “Right-wing lawmakers in the state’s capital chose to make it hard to vote because they believed that lower turnout in Milwaukee would help them win a statewide race for Supreme Court.” The article went on to suggest that then-President Donald Trump and the Republican Party mobilized the COVID-19 pandemic to undermine the integrity of elections. Narang’s and Cantor’s proposed solutions are that states should adopt left-of-center voting procedures that could weaken election security, including the mass-mailing of absentee ballots. ¹⁵

1. Rajan Narang. Stand Up America. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://standupamerica.com/team/rajan-narang/
2. About Us. Stand Up America. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://standupamerica.com/about-us/
3. Rajan Narang. State Democracy Project. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.statedemocracyproject.org/rajan-narang
4. Rajan Narang – Experience. LinkedIn. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdnarang/details/experience/
5. Rajan Narang. LinkedIn. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdnarang/
6. Rajan Narang, SSP’15. Georgetown University Center for Security Studies. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://css.georgetown.edu/profile/rajan-narang/
7. ^[1] Rajan Narang. LinkedIn. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdnarang/
8. Rajan Narang, SSP’15. Georgetown University Center for Security Studies. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://css.georgetown.edu/profile/rajan-narang/
9. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Oyez. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205
10. Rajan Narang. Stand Up America. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://standupamerica.com/team/rajan-narang/
11. Rajan Narang. State Democracy Project. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.statedemocracyproject.org/rajan-narang
12. Rajan Narang – Experience. LinkedIn. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdnarang/details/experience/
13. About. State Democracy Project. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.statedemocracyproject.org/about
14. Rajan Narang. LinkedIn. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdnarang/
15. Cantor, Dan and Narang, Rajan. “Out of Chaos, Progress.” The Forge. December 15, 2020. Accessed August 18, 2024. https://forgeorganizing.org/article/out-chaos-progress