Leslie Sanchez - Consultant and Commentator

Consultant and Commentator

At Impacto, Sanchez quickly racked up an impressive list of clients, including Cisco Systems and Prudential Financial. Impacto's analytical work has also impressed political watchers. In 2004, the Independent Women's Forum commissioned a psycholinguistic survey of Hispanic and Caucasian female voters that is considered seminal in the field.

While primarily engaged in consulting, Sanchez appears frequently on television as a political commentator. Since founding Impacto, she has made numerous appearances on various political shows including CNN's The Situation Room, Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, and PBS's The McLaughlin Group, To the Contrary, and The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In addition to being a regular commentator on Fox and CNN, Sanchez also appears frequently on MSNBC, Telemundo, and Univision.

Sanchez has been sought after for several election-related projects. In 2004 and 2006, respectively, she worked for the BBC in their coverage of the presidential and congressional elections. In 2008, she served as a political contributor for CNN's election coverage series. The following year, the network was awarded the distinguished Peabody Award for its reporting on the 2008 presidential campaign. Sanchez's commentary is featured in the PBS documentary Latinos 08 which examines the presidential election through the prism of ethnic politics.

Sanchez has written a significant number of editorials, opinion pieces, and other articles for such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and US News & World Report, as well as two books. Her first, Los Republicanos: Why Republicans and Hispanics Need Each Other, was published in 2007. In it, Sanchez makes the argument that since most Hispanics share core beliefs with the Republican Party (GOP) and represent the fastest growing minority, then they can and should play an integral role in forming a conservative majority. The book has been cited by one reviewer as "a proto-type analysis that can be applied to other minority groups in America." Sanchez's second book, You've Come a Long Way, Maybe: Michelle, Sarah, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American Woman, was released in October 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin's Press.

In recent years, Sanchez has been increasingly critical of what she sees as the GOP's patronizing attempts in courting Hispanics, especially since the 2008 elections. Calling the immigration debate, "Prop. 187 on steroids," Sanchez warns that "Republicans embrace anti-immigrant fervor at their own peril." Instead, she argues that the Party should re-adopt the successful strategies employed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who appealed to Hispanics, she opines, "not as Hispanics or immigrants but as Americans with an equal stake in the future of the country."