Alexander McCoy is a political strategist who has spent over a decade leading campaigns at the national level: building organizations from nothing, managing large staffs, raising the money, and winning. His work runs through Congress, presidential politics, state legislatures, and the labor movement, and since 2023 it has centered on the politics of artificial intelligence.

He co-founded Common Defense in 2016 and built it into the largest grassroots organization of progressive veterans in the country. As Communications Director he grew a newsletter community of 250,000 subscribers and a grassroots fundraising program that generated a million dollars in donations. As Political Director he directed the organization's national campaigns and its electoral program, and raised millions of dollars across its c3, c4, and PAC entities.

Two of those campaigns changed national policy. In 2019 he directed the effort that helped persuade swing-district members of Congress to initiate the first impeachment of Donald Trump. From 2019 to 2021 he led the campaign to end the war in Afghanistan, from the narrative work that made "end the forever wars" a phrase presidential candidates had to answer for, through the pledge seven of them signed, the plank in the 2020 Democratic platform, a first-of-its-kind appointments coalition, and direct negotiation with the White House in the run-up to President Biden's withdrawal decision. George Packer covered the campaign's final act in The Atlantic; Alexander Ward tells the fuller story in The Internationalists (Penguin, 2024).

He has run large operations. As Senior Campaigns Director at NextGen America, he led the national field program of the country's largest youth voter registration organization through the 2024 cycle: eight state teams, hundreds of staff organizers, a unionized workforce, and registration goals tracked down to the individual organizer. When the Democratic ticket changed in July 2024, he organized the Progressives for Harris national call in five days, with 37 speakers, 550,000 views, and 20,000 volunteer shift sign-ups.

His AI work began in 2023, as Senior Advisor to New York State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, chair of the Senate Technology Committee, working on AI regulation. After a year leading climate accountability campaigns at Public Citizen, where he worked with litigators pursuing fossil fuel companies and helped stop a proposed civil immunity waiver for Big Oil, he returned to AI full-time: founding head of the left coalition at Humans First, then an incubator of its successor organizations. In 2025 he organized Florida veterans against the use of active-duty troops in ICE operations. That campaign's open letter, public testimony, and local press work preceded the revocation of a Marine unit's deployment to the Everglades detention site and contributed to Orange County ending its ICE detention agreement.

The politics came from the service. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2008, the fourth consecutive generation of his family to serve, and spent six years in uniform, including embassy security duty in Saudi Arabia, Honduras, and Germany. Serving through the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" showed him how far Washington's debates can drift from the people they govern. He left as a Sergeant and went to Columbia on the G.I. Bill, where he studied the history of grassroots social movements.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Reuters, and HuffPost. He has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, NPR, and the TEDx stage. Washingtonian named him one of its "Most Influential People in Washington."

He lives in Orlando, Florida, with his wife and two kids. On the right weekend you can find him at a renaissance fair in a full suit of armor.