about mike sertic

Mike Sertic has spent his career on a single question: what does it take for people to govern themselves well? His work spans political education, organizational design, and assessment tools, all built on a conviction that self-governance is a practice, not just a philosophy, and that the right tools and discipline can help anyone get better at it.

He got his start on the early executive team of Students For Liberty, helping build what became the largest international network of pro-liberty students in the world. He helped create programming, content, and infrastructure that reached campuses across the United States. It was there that he first saw what happens when people discover they aren't politically homeless: they start acting on what they believe. That experience shaped a lasting conviction that political self-understanding is where self-governance begins.

From there, Mike moved to the Self-Management Institute at Morning Star Company, the world's largest tomato processor and one of the most radical experiments in decentralized organization ever attempted at industrial scale. He studied how thousands of people coordinate complex operations through voluntary agreements rather than command-and-control authority. It was a formative experience. Self-governance, it turned out, wasn't just a political idea. It was something people could practice every day, with the right structures and incentives around them.

Today, Mike serves as President of the Advocates for Self-Government, a national nonprofit and the organization behind the World's Smallest Political Quiz. The Quiz has been taken by approximately 30 million people over its 40-year history, making it among the most widely used political assessment tools ever created. At its core, it helps people understand what they actually believe so they can engage with politics more intentionally rather than defaulting to a party label. Mike leads the organization's strategy, fundraising, operations, and program development, including Quiz in the Classroom, which brings nonpartisan political education into schools, and Operation Politically Homeless, a grassroots outreach format used at thousands of public events nationwide.

He is also the creator of Political DNA, an independent political assessment platform he designed and built. Where most political quizzes flatten your worldview onto a single axis, Political DNA maps individuals across 32 distinct political archetypes. The goal is the same one that runs through all of Mike's work: self-understanding is the starting point, but self-governance requires something more — a grasp of the principles by which free people actually live, cooperate, and flourish.

He lives in the Sacramento region with his wife, two daughters, and two dogs.