Political Strategist Punya Krishnappa Joins Uber as Manager of Federal Campaigns

Uber has named political strategist and advocacy professional Punya Krishnappa as manager for federal campaigns. In a LinkedIn post, C.R. Wooters, head of Federal Affairs at Uber wrote that the growing Uber Federal team is pleased to add Krishnappa and Erin Reif, who are “rockstars and we are lucky to get to work with them.”

Krishnappa most recently served as a senior strategist for Baltimore tech entrepreneur Michael Rosenbaum’s Maryland gubernatorial campaign. A deputy national field director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, she was the Director of States for Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote initiative.

She has also worked for President Obama’s White House campaigns and for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. At DCCC, Krishnappa, who is trained in communications, digital, research and field tactics, ran the largest and earliest field investment program in the committee’s history.

She graduated from Bradley University in 2011with a BA in Public Relations, Advertising and Applied Communications.

In an article titled “I Found My Voice Here” in Bradley magazine, Krishnappa wrote that when she started at Bradley in the fall of 2007, she had “every intention of being the next Christiane Amanpour.” However, she credits her experience at the university for her entry into the political world. “It started that same fall when Anna Ruch ’10 asked me to volunteer for a trip to Iowa,” she writes, adding how she ”went from knocking on doors on weekends in Cedar Rapids for then-Sen. Barack Obama to organize trips to Missouri, Wisconsin and Indiana.” She eventually took the fall semester of my sophomore year to work for Obama in North Carolina during the general election.

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She said one of her “fondest memories” is the year she spent in Iowa in 2015 leading up to the start of the 2016 primaries. “A presidential campaign is the political Super Bowl, and working for Sen. Hillary Clinton was inspiring every day. Working with so many talented people was beyond what I could have expected.”

After a brief hiatus post-2016 — a year in the hospitality industry — she returned to politics as director of states for Michelle Obama’s civic engagement initiative, When We All Vote. “Focused solely on motivating people to vote, the initiative aimed to change the culture around voting,” Krishnappa wrote in the magazine.