Wally Nowinski
Wally Nowinski is a new father, El Cerrito homeowner and former Democratic campaign strategist working in San Francisco. He’s spent his career finding novel solutions for difficult problems and making the most of limited resources.
Wally and his wife Anne met in college in Michigan and bought their first home in El Cerrito in 2023, where they're now raising their three-month-old daughter, Margot.
Wally spent his early career in Michigan Democratic politics, later going on to work on the winning Congressional campaigns for Representative Niki Tsongas in Massachusetts and Senator Debbie Stabenow in Michigan. During the elections, Wally helped overhaul how both candidates did digital advertising and fundraising, helping bring down costs and defeat Republican challengers.
Wally left DC to join the startup Collage, the e-commerce gift company that popularized the photo blanket. As an executive at Collage, Wally helped grow the company from four people to more than 100 employees.
Today, Wally leads consumer sales at the green energy company Impulse Labs. Impulse makes a battery-powered induction stove top that can boil a liter of water in 40 seconds – in addition to helping people quit natural gas.
During the 2024 presidential election, Wally found himself frustrated by how little an average campaign contribution seemed to do to combat Donald Trump. With a friend, Wally started a Super PAC that devised an unconventional way to show anti-Trump ads to digital audiences for pennies on the dollar that earned praise from top Democratic strategists for its creativity. You can read more about that endeavor in Slate, Newsweek and NPR.
Most recently, Wally helped lead the effort against Measure C, El Cerrito's library tax – an ill-conceived and poorly drafted plan to build a library in El Cerrito Plaza on the ground floor of a delayed housing development.
The throughline of Wally’s career has been asking hard questions and finding unconventional ways to use the resources available. If elected, that’s the approach he’ll bring to the city council: asking the hard questions and finding new ways of doing things to make El Cerrito’s tax dollars go as far as possible.
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