About
Over the past twenty years, Sharon Hixon has provided statistical analyses of voter and U.S. Census data to support political campaigns. These efforts have helped develop overall campaign strategies and field plans that led to the successful election of at least 100 candidates from U.S. senators to local school board members.
Sharon’s experience in data management and her extensive political information technology expertise led her to develop two custom political data management software. ElectMaster, an information system that signals demographic shifts to support a seat change, and a proprietary mobile field application ElectTracker. Field teams have utilized the latter, including two successful Mayoral campaigns: Keisha Lance Bottoms for Mayor and Andre Dickens for Mayor of Atlanta.
Previously, Sharon was an applications programmer for the Division of Sexually Transmitted Disease within the Statistics and Data Management Branch of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Within this role, she served as the lead applications developer of STDINFO, an ad-hoc graphic and tabular report generator that provides access to data and tools for querying, analysis, and reporting. STDINFO was later nominated by a lead market data management group to be included in the Smithsonian Institution’s Permanent Research Collection. This application was considered for a 2001 Computerworld Smithsonian Award. In addition, Sharon has co-authored and presented two scientific papers on data storage and application design strategies. One of which received the honor of Best Paper Award at the 22nd Annual SAS Users Group International Conference.
Rashad Taylor
Rashad Taylor has worked at the nexus of political campaigns and policymaking for 20 years. Rashad served as Senior Advisor and chief political strategist to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Rashad has served as Georgia State Director for the Biden for President campaign during the primary election, Executive Director of Battleground Georgia, Inc. SuperPAC, political director for the Democratic Party of Georgia, and the first Chief Equity Officer for Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Rashad is widely respected for his expertise as a political strategist. Rashad has been responsible for leading many upset political campaigns, including for Atlanta Mayors Keisha Lance Bottoms and Kasim Reed, and New Castle County Executive Matthew Meyer. His political experience includes campaign work for Congressman John Lewis and former US Senator Max Cleland. He previously worked as a Strategic Partner with Mack Sumner Communications. Rashad is a 2008 Rising Star Award from Campaigns and Elections Magazine and a 2017 recipient of the Delaware Business Times 40 Under 40 Award.
Rashad served two terms in the Georgia House of Representatives (2009-2012) where he was elected Vice Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, the fourth-highest ranking leadership position in the 180-member body.
Rashad has served on the Board of Directors of the Joseph Whitehead YMCA, Georgia Equality, and the Kindezi School. He was born and raised in Washington, DC and attended Morehouse College. Rashad’s views and opinions about politics and policy have been featured in several major publications, including Roll Call, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bloomberg News, MSNBC, and The New York Times.