Leigh McGowan launched PoliticsGirl as a way to help people reconnect with politics. She started the YouTube channel in 2015 as a way to inform and inspire because she said, “when you understand you care, and when you care you vote”. After watching the fallout from the Trump years, Leigh relaunched the project on TikTok in September of 2020 doing rants in her kitchen as a way to engage the younger generation whose participation, she believed, was essential to the future of the country. People loved her no-nonsense, casual approach and the way she was able to break down complicated issues into everyday speak. As her numbers grew so did her popularity and influence. People like her because she’s smart in a way that doesn’t make them feel dumb. She’s able to put into words what people are thinking, or she’s thinking what people can’t quite put into words. Leigh is now on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram as @IAmPoliticsGirl and PoliticsGirl on YouTube & Facebook. With over a million followers, her rants now have hundreds of millions of views and she’s supported by everyone from leading politicians and celebrities, to a deep cross-section of the American public. She’s been featured in multiple publications and her rants have been played in their entirety numerous times on national news broadcasts like MSNBC’s the 11th Hour. The rants were also the inspiration for the extremely popular PoliticsGirl Podcast, which launched as a weekly download in audio and visual form in November of 2021, and has featured everyone from White House Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, to Broadway & Television Superstar, Alexandra Billings. Her stand alone episodes, without guests, explain complicated issues in a way the general public can understand, and has touched on subjects ranging from the "History of Public Education in America” to “The Rise of Autocracy Around the World”.  Leigh writes, researches and performs all her own pieces, and has truly inspired the country, and the world at large, to reengage with American politics. Her work is now credited with making a difference to everything from election results to public opinion and she’s now been to the White House on multiple occasions to meet with the President and his staff because of that influence. Her work during the 2022 midterms with from everyone to Democrats Abroad and The States Project, to individual campaigns, can to be seen to have made a discernible difference to results.

Ultimately Leigh truly believes in the American experiment, and trusts that we can fix what’s broken. The county might be sitting at a terrifying crossroad, but she sees it as an opportunity, and subscribes to the idea that no matter what we’ve been taught, EVERYONE should be talking about politics. Not caring about government doesn’t mean their decisions don’t affect you, it means you can’t affect them. And it’s about time ‘We the People’ had some say over our own lives, and that all starts with understanding.