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Political Pathways

  • Alumni
Political Pathways
Eliott Grover '06

From presidential campaigns to congressional caucuses, these Tabor graduates have worked on the front lines of history.

If the context of a person’s life can be thought of as the confluence of their existence with a specific time and place, the four years Nate Walton ’04 spent at Tabor shed much light on the person he is today. 

Walton is the founder and principal of Sachem Strategies, a consulting firm that advises defense technology companies. He has extensive political experience, having worked on campaigns at every level of government, including Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run. Walton’s precocious interest in current events was influenced by the mentors he found at Tabor and the significant historical moments that accompanied his coming of age. 

The 2000 presidential race was heating up as Walton arrived in Marion for his freshman year. He visited the Hayden Library often to keep up with news from the campaign trail. “While I had a preferred candidate, I don’t recall being particularly motivated by ideology as much as an interest in the process itself,” says Walton.

He took “Speech and Debate” with the late Dick Marr, who recognized Walton’s passion for consuming and analyzing news. Walton credits Marr with honing his ability to organize and present his thoughts in a compelling manner. When he started writing for Tabor’s newspaper, The Log, Walton often showed Marr his first drafts and looked forward to getting them back with his teacher’s trademark scribbles. 

The second day of Walton’s sophomore year was September 11, 2001. He has a vivid memory of his advisor, Merry Conway, predicting how the day’s horrific events would shape the world for a generation. “I hoped at the time that this was hyperbole,” remembers Walton. “But her prediction has borne out nearly 25 years after the attacks.” 

In the wake of 9/11, Walton recalls feeling concerned about some of the policy measures that defined the government’s response. During an award-winning speech at the Mattapoisett Lions Club, he extolled the importance of protecting civil liberties. The following summer, Walton attended a Future World Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C., after his history teacher, Anne Gardiner, left a pamphlet for the conference in his mailbox.

It wasn’t just teachers who served as mentors. Jamie Nissen ’02 was president of his class before being elected student Head of School. He encouraged Walton to run for student government. Walton ended up serving on the Tabor Academy Student Council (TASC) for three years, including two as class president. During his senior year, Walton served as co-editor-in-chief of The Log and revitalized the paper as a discussion forum about campus issues. In the 2004 Fore ‘n’ Aft, he received the senior superlative for “Future President.”

The next fall, Walton started at Bates College. Once again, a presidential race was in full swing. Maine was a tightly contested battleground, and Bates had an active College Republicans chapter that counted several Tabor alums as members, including Nissen. During his second day on campus, Walton knocked on the chapter president’s door. “He wasted no time getting me involved,” recalls Walton.

Within days, Walton was volunteering at local events where he met, among others, President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush. The following spring, he was elected chapter president, and then several months later, he was elected state chair of the Maine College Republicans. This role sent Walton across Maine to recruit and train new campus leaders and to raise money for a field operation that he took his junior fall semester off to manage. In 2007, Maine was named the “Best State Federation in America” by the National College Republicans organization.

“It was a whirlwind experience,” says Walton, of his time leading the Maine College Republicans. “Sometimes I look back and wonder how, at age 20-21, I managed paid field staff, solicited major donors, and hosted conventions featuring U.S. senators. I’m grateful for the experience as much of my professional network can be traced back to the relationships and reputation that I built during this period.”

After graduating, Walton turned down campaign job offers, opting to gain experience as a national security analyst amid the post-9/11 conflicts that were escalating overseas. As a researcher at Harvard University, he helped support a Department of Defense contract to develop a technology platform that measured the impact of humanitarian and military interventions. “It was my first exposure to the challenges and opportunities of the defensive innovation ecosystem,” says Walton. 

In 2012, Walton joined the Romney campaign, first as one of its youngest fundraisers and later as a defense policy advisor, all while earning his master’s in public policy from Brown University. He relished the intense atmosphere of the campaign, where everyone from the campaign manager to the interns rolled up their sleeves to do whatever job was necessary. 

“One reason I enjoy working with early-stage companies in my current professional role is that they often have a similarly egalitarian philosophy,” says Walton. “Many startups have an all-hands-on-deck culture that focuses on outcomes not hierarchies.”

Walton founded Sachem Strategies to help defense technology companies navigate a complex regulatory and policy landscape that often hinders their growth. He started primarily as a lobbyist for companies, but his business has evolved to include advising venture capital firms on investment opportunities. Walton notes that his advocacy work is bipartisan in nature as most members of Congress share an interest in advancing defense innovation. 

“Sometimes there is an impression that working in government or politics requires you to be a fervent partisan,” says Walton. “I’ve never really thought of myself that way. I’ve always been conflicted about the intellectual limitations of partisanship, even when I was active with campaigns. This is largely due to the mentors and influences I had at Tabor.”

Studying at Tabor during a fraught and volatile chapter in world history, Walton learned to view situations with objectivity and empathy. He credits his teachers with instilling an appreciation for seeing the other side of every issue and valuing diverse viewpoints. “Unfortunately too much of our political discourse today wedges complicated topics into a black or white duality,” says Walton, “Every situation has shades of gray and requires a balanced perspective.”

Growing up, Gabrielle Gould ’07 did not expect to become a Washington insider. “I had never been what I would call ‘political,’” says Gould. “I had a lot of opinions and wanted to be part of fixing things, but I never wanted to be involved in politics or campaigns. That all felt really conniving.” 

A longstanding interest in current affairs and public policy, however, inevitably led Gould to Capitol Hill. She has nearly a decade of experience working in Congress, where she started as a Congressional Fellow and worked her way up to become the Legislative Director for Representative Bill Keating (D-MA), whose congressional district includes Marion.  

Fans of political television series will appreciate Gould’s assessment of life on the Hill. “We all came because we wanted it to be West Wing, but it’s Veep,” she says. As for the conniving connotation, Gould adds, “It’s absolutely not House of Cards. No one has the time or coordination for it to be House of Cards!” 

In 2021, shortly after President Biden was sworn in, Gould became the first Executive Director of the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC). Her mandate was to assemble a staff and mobilize congressional members to raise awareness and funds for key issues. “There was a big push for investments in different aspects of the economy and social systems,” says Gould. “The DWC decided that they were going to go all in on the care economy.”

As a legislative priority, Gould explains, care encompasses everything from child and elder care to paid leave and maternal health equity. “Childcare workers and homecare workers are chronically left behind with shamefully low wages,” she says. “Now we have a generation that’s retiring and aging that is going to need care, and their children are already caring for their own children. We’re headed for an untenable situation and a lot of tough issues.”

The opportunity to advance solutions for tough issues is what motivates Gould. “I think of solving problems as policy,” she says. “Versus politics, I think of as winning elections—how you get to be in the place where you can do the policy work.” While Gould acknowledges that politics can feel like the enemy of effective policy-making, particularly in the House of Representatives where members run every two years, she has come to accept their symbiotic nature. 

During her time with the DWC, Gould tapped into a diverse skill set to build relationships between constituents, advocates, experts, and politicians. “I’m not a huge extrovert and I don’t love public speaking,” she says. “Something that was incredibly helpful was just projecting confidence even when I didn’t feel it. There were a lot of times when I ended up in meetings and if I thought about it, it probably would’ve scared the hell out of me. But you just fall into the room sometimes and you make it work.” One room she “fell into” was the Roosevelt Room of the White House when she attended a meeting with President Biden and Vice President Harris. 

Last spring, Gould stepped away from Congress after the birth of her first child. “This has been a good strategic pause,” she says, noting that she plans to return to politics to continue fighting for care reform. The time away has given her an opportunity to reflect on her journey, a path on which Tabor looms large.  

“​​There was a depth that you got at Tabor just given the faculty and the smaller classes,” she says. “I’m a generalist. I never wanted to specialize in anything. At Tabor, that translated into taking all these different classes, being part of the school paper, rowing, doing ceramics. That translated really well, especially in Congress. I developed these strong core competencies and am not intimidated by the sheer volume of the tasks at hand.” 

Gould served as co-editor-in-chief of The Log, writing often about current events. The summer before her senior year, she attended a journalism conference at Columbia University that helped her develop the necessary skills to manage a newsroom. 

The diversity of the student body is another aspect of her Tabor education that Gould cherishes. “There are so few places to experience that at that age,” she says. “You just learn to operate in different contexts with people from different backgrounds and perspectives. When you’re in the workplace, and I am constantly interacting with different people, your ability to build trust and navigate different contexts is priceless.” 

Gould attended Harvard as an undergraduate before earning her law degree from Georgetown University, milestones she credits to the stimulating and rigorous environment fostered at Tabor. “I was very competitive academically, which was great because there was always more to do,” she says. “Thankfully, I’m not [that way] anymore, because that would be exhausting, but I enjoyed never being done. And never being done is still how I feel!”