Associate - North Carolina

Nesbitt & Parrinello is seeking an Associate based in North Carolina through the 2024 election. The Associate is a key member of the research team, monitoring candidates on a day-to-day basis and reporting out. The Associate will be responsible for staying up to date on the activities of candidates while building opportunities to drive the narrative.

The Associate opportunity requires employees to live and work in North Carolina and have access to reliable transportation. Interviews will be held in July with an anticipated start date of July 29, 2024. The position runs through November 19, 2024.

You will work with an amazing team to win some of the most critical Democratic campaigns of the election cycle. You will achieve advanced professional work experience in political campaigns, opposition research, political writing, tracking, fact-checking, rapid response, and writing for digital communication. Top tier progressive political campaigners, investigative journalists, future top law school grads, and policy debaters will benefit from this experience.

Ideal candidates will have prior campaign experience as part of a research team, coursework in journalism or experience writing and editing for publication in a collegiate or professional news writing environment. Associates will work on all aspects of political research including vetting, research, tracking, fact checking and copy editing at the highest levels of American political campaigns.

Responsibilities include:

• Comprehensively tracking candidates’ schedules
• Attending events in person and finding opportunities to record candidates’ appearances and statements
• Transcribing and comprehensively reporting out events and activities
• Rapid response and paid media tracking
• Coordinating efforts and schedules with other members of the Nesbitt & Parrinello research team
• Other duties as assigned

Desired Skills:

Great candidates are most of the following

• Comfortable working in a diverse environment, with people who have experience different from your own
• Dedicated to building a more progressive America
• An exceptional writer comfortable writing and editing in a fast-paced professional news writing environment
• Curious, very curious
• Communicative: able to ask questions, pitch ideas, and give and receive feedback
• Able to turn complex and diverse information into clear summaries with a consistent point of view
• Great attention to detail
• Skilled in web project management for complex projects
• Comfortable with web apps for communication, project management, and research
• Digitally native and comfortable learning new softwares for communication, project management, and research. Bonus points for familiarity with Git and markdown.
• Experience with LexisNexis, public records requests, analyzing primary source documents, commonly-used research databases and other basic opposition research tasks is a plus, but not required.

Logistics & Working Conditions:

• Must live in North Carolina or be willing to relocate
• Temporary, Full Time (exempt) Position
• 40+ Hours per week. Expect night, weekend, and unconventional work hours as called for by the demands of the campaign cycle
• Must be able to work from the road in-state, and as part of a professional office environment

• Must have a valid driver’s license, a reliable mode of transportation, and the ability to travel throughout the state for more than a day at a time
• Must have access to a secure and private work environment, reliable internet connection

Our recruitment process includes a short skills-based exam, which we believe opens opportunities to applicants who might have acquired the relevant research skills in ways not easily represented on a resume, ensuring we don't miss great applicants with less traditional work experience or education. We allow up to 24 hours to complete the exam once started, but most applicants spend about an hour. No exam content is ever used in our work product and is strictly for applicant evaluation purposes.

About Us:

N&P is a minority-owned and a woman-owned small business. Allen Nesbitt started our business in 2005 and he is the first Black person to lead a Democratic opposition research firm in the United States. Allen Nesbitt and Cristina Parrinello are diverse researchers who are committed to encouraging and training future generations of diverse researchers. N&P is led by a diverse team: we are 44% people of color, 30% LGBTQ+, and our management team is 50% women.

Our mission is to make the world a more progressive, inclusive, and fair place and this begins with the internal functioning of our company. We strive to integrate cultural competency both within our work product and within our team. We aim to exceed the minimum non-discrimination policies by proactively recruiting from underrepresented communities via Historically Black Colleges and Universities and minority ethnic group-focused academic support organizations.

We strive to provide equal opportunity to all team members and future team members. We believe that extraordinary results stem from the broadest possible diversity of opinions and backgrounds. We provide equal opportunity to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, genetic information, marital status, or any other category provided by state or local laws.

Learn more about how we work here.