Casey Newcomer - 50CAN National

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Casey Newcomer

Research and Advocacy Manager

Casey Newcomer was born in Charleston, West Virginia and grew up in Indiana, Pennsylvania, a small town best known as Jimmy Stewart’s hometown, where he spent his time fishing and playing every sport he could. He attended Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, studying political science alongside criminology, law and society, and spent his part of his senior year studying abroad in South Africa, where he examined the country’s judicial system and visited schools in the townships outside Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Casey interned on his first campaign in 2014 and has worked in politics ever since. He joined the Republican National Committee as an intern during the 2016 presidential election and returned as staff in western Pennsylvania in 2020, deploying to central Georgia for the Senate runoffs that followed. He then started as Deputy State Director at Canvass America where he recruited and trained organizers across Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. He moved to Nashville in 2023 to manage Alice Rolli’s campaign for mayor, which reached the runoff out of a field of twelve, and later served as political director at Direct Edge Campaigns.

After years in partisan politics, Casey wanted to put the same skills toward something with a longer horizon than election night. He is grateful to be part of a team at 50CAN working toward something bigger than any single race, and to spend his days on the question of what is actually best for kids.

More about Casey Newcomer

I aspire to be like Joe Manchin. Here's why:

He was willing to be the person in the room who worked across the aisle when it would have been easier to hold the line with his own side. That is not a comfortable place to stand, and it usually costs you something. But education policy is where that willingness matters most. The families waiting on a better school do not care which party finally delivers it, and the fights that go nowhere are almost always the ones where nobody was willing to cross the aisle first. I would rather be useful than be popular with one team.

Why I love my job:

I have spent most of my career in partisan politics, where winning the election was the whole point. We still work elections here, and I still want our candidates to win. The difference is what the win is for. On a campaign, election night is the finish line. Here it is the starting line, because the reason we want these candidates in office is what they will do for kids once they get there. I am grateful to be part of something where the message is bigger than any one race, and where the question we are always coming back to is what is actually best for children.

My connection to public schools:

My parents made real sacrifices to send my brother and me to a small private school, because it was the education they believed was right for us. Pennsylvania had no voucher program, so that choice came straight out of our family's pocket. We made it work. A lot of families cannot, and they end up with whatever school their address assigns them. That is my connection to public schools. I want every family to have the option mine had to make sacrifices for, and I want the neighborhood school to be good enough that plenty of them never need it.

What I’m bad at:

Eating my vegetables.

The image that represents why I work at 50CAN:

This mosaic is on the wall of a school in Khayelitsha, a township outside Cape Town, South Africa, one of several schools I visited while studying abroad my senior year. It reads "Education is the key" in English and isiXhosa, and shows grandparents, parents and children all reading together. What stayed with me were the students. School was the safest, steadiest part of an otherwise chaotic day, and they knew it. Eight thousand miles from home, families wanted exactly what families here want. Demand for a good education has never been the variable. Access is.