Ying Ma is founder and president of the American Ideals PAC, a political action committee, and founder and president of Defend American Ideals, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Both organizations champion the founding ideals of this country.
Ms. Ma is also host of “National Insecurity,” a foreign policy podcast; author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, a memoir about getting to know freedom from post-Mao China to inner-city Oakland, California; and member of the Board of Advisors for the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, an organization that prepares young women for effective leadership and promotes leading conservative women.
Ms. Ma has advised multiple high-profile national and regional campaigns. In 2021, she served as the communications director for the Elder for Governor campaign in the special California recall election. Under her direction, the campaign generated explosive national publicity generally only seen by major presidential candidates. In just two months, the Elder campaign raised more than $20 million, a majority of which resulted directly from the communications strategy and operation that Ms. Ma oversaw.
In the previous year, she was the communications director of the NO on Prop 16 Campaign, which defeated an attempt to reinstate race-based affirmative action in California by a 57 to 43 percent margin. Ms. Ma played a significant role in delivering the resounding victory, and along with other political veterans, provided extensive strategic guidance and coaching to a campaign staff that possessed little to no political experience.
In the 2016 elections, Ms. Ma served as deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a super PAC formed to support the candidacy of Donald Trump for president. In the GOP primaries of the same year, she was the deputy policy director and deputy communications director for the Ben Carson presidential campaign.
Previously, Ms. Ma served as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, a premier conservative think tank; practiced law at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, a preeminent global law firm headquartered in New York; managed corporate communications at Sina, the first Mainland China-based Internet company to list on the Nasdaq Stock Market; worked on the first professional staff of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional commission; and advised public affairs clients in the Hong Kong office of Burson-Marsteller, a leading international public relations firm.
From 2007 to 2012, Ms. Ma was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1998, Ms. Ma worked on the staff of an American delegation whose leaders were appointed by former President Bill Clinton and invited by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin to visit China and discuss religious freedom. In 1996, Ms. Ma was the Bay Area Outreach Coordinator for Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that ended public racial and gender preferences in California.
Ms. Ma has written widely about politics, conservatism, China, and international affairs. She has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, NBC News, Forbes.com, Washington Examiner, and other publications. Her on-air commentary has been featured on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, Bloomberg Television, and elsewhere.
Ms. Ma received a B.A. in Government, magna cum laude, from Cornell University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. In college, she served as president of The Cornell Review, a bi-weekly conservative newspaper. In law school, she was president of the Stanford Chapter of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, an organization dedicated to conservative and libertarian legal principles.
Ms. Ma legally immigrated to the United States from Communist China at age ten.
Ying Ma 