Political Analytics 2017 Speakers

NATE SILVER

Founder & Editor in Chief, FiveThirtyEight

Nate Silver is a statistician, ABC News Special Correspondent and a best-selling author. He successfully called the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 election and was named one of the World's Most Influential People by TIME Magazine in 2009.

The New York Times

Wesley Morris is a renowned journalist and a Critic at Large for the New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011 for his work with The Boston Globe and was a former full-time writer for Grantland.

CBS News

Anthony Salvanto is Director of Elections for CBS News. He heads the Decision Desk that projects elections, conducts polling, analyzes key races and public opinion and appears across broadcasts including Face the Nation.

The Upshot, New York Times

Nate Cohn is a writer for The Upshot and writes frequently on polling, demographics, and elections. He was a staff writer for The New Republic and a Scoville Fellow at the Stimson Center, where his expertise lied in analysis of South Asia and the defense budget.

Harvard University

Steve Ansolabehere is the Director for the Center for American Political Studies and an expert in public opinion and elections. He is a member of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Study.

Google Government & Advocacy

Ashley Wiers is an Account Executive on Google’s Government & Advocacy team. She has managed Google’s relationships with political campaigns, advocacy groups, and government agencies, advising on digital strategy, creative, and measurement across Google media platforms.

UCLA

Lynn Vavreck is a Professor of Political Science and Communication Studies at UCLA and a contributor to The Upshot at the New York Times. She is a 2015 Andrew F. Carnegie Award winner, and she writes about campaigns and elections.

L2

Tracy Dietz is the EVP in Sales & Marketing at L2. She is the former Associate Publisher at Campaigns & Elections magazine and a former Executive Director of the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC).

Definers Public Affairs

Tim Miller is a partner at Definers Public Affairs and specializes in communications and digital strategy. He served as the Communications Director for Jeb Bush 2016 and as senior advisor to the GOP’s leading anti-Trump Super PAC “Our Principles”.

RealClearPolitics

Sean Trende is the Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics. He is the author of "The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs and Who Will Take It," and co-authored the Almanac of American Politics 2014.

The New York Times

Alicia Parlapiano is a Washington-based member of the New York Times graphics department. She previously worked for the Washington Post and studied journalism at the University of North Carolina. She tends to work on graphics related to politics, policy, or the economy.

George Washington University

John Sides is an Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. He also helped found and now contributes to The Monkey Cage, a Washington Post blog about politics and political science.

MIT

Deb Roy is the director of the Social Machines group at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Laboratory for Social Machines. He is also an associate professor at MIT and has been the chief media scientist of Twitter since Twitter acquired his analytics company in 2013.

Microsoft Research

David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research and fellow at the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia, studies both user engagement with online data, polling, and markets, and aggregation of that data into sentiment and forecasts.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Luke Miratrix is an Assistant Professor of Education in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and was previously an Assistant Professor of Statistics. His research interests include causality theory, data mining, and text summarization.

FP1 Strategies

Danny Diaz is a founding partner at FP1 Strategies LLC and has worked at the highest levels in national political campaigns. Most recently, he served as campaign manager for former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

DonorBureau

Matt Hafer is the co-founder of DonorBureau, a company which helps organizations target donors by identifying the best prospects for mail and online acquisition programs. He is a graduate of Duke and Stanford.

Harvard University

Ryan Enos is a social scientist specializing in political psychology, race and ethnic politics, and political behavior in the United States. He is a fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Center for American Political Studies. His first book The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics will be released in fall 2017.

University of Texas at Austin

Shannon McGregor is a PhD candidate in UT's School of Journalism, specializing in political communication, digital media, gender, and public opinion. Her research involves using social media data to comprehend how political actors, media, and the public interact with political events on social networks.

MSNBC

Steve Kornacki is a political writer and television host, known for his work in the New York Times, The New York Observer, Up with Steve Kornacki and MTP Daily. He was a political analyst for MSNBC's coverage of breaking news for the 2016 election.

MTV News

Ana Marie Cox is a renowned journalist and author working at a variety of news outlets such as MTV News, The Daily Beast, and Time magazine. She is also the founder of political blog Wonkette and is the author of best-selling novel Dog Days.

FiveThirtyEight

Andrei Scheinkman is a director of data and technology and a deputy editor for FiveThirtyEight. He has worked for The Huffington Post and The New York Times and is an expert in developing data-driven interactive features for online publications.

The Upshot, New York Times

Amanda Cox is an editor for The Upshot and is an expert in visual journalism involving graphics, interactives, and other multimedia on web platforms. Her work has vastly improved the reader experience for the New York Times to follow election returns and election coverage.

Yale University

Eitan Hersh is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale. He is an expert in campaign strategy, voting behavior, information technology and politics, and election administration. He is the author of Hacking the Electorate.

Facbook Data Communications

Dr. Robert D’Onofrio is Facebook’s Director of Data Communications. He and his team bring to life the many ways in which 1.79 billion people come together on Facebook to talk about what’s going on in the world, from sports to entertainment to the latest breaking news.

The Pollsters

Margie Omero is EVP of Public Affairs at PSB Research, an international strategic research company. She is also co-host of the popular bipartisan podcast ‘The Pollsters’, which explains the numbers driving each week’s biggest news stories.

UCLA

Matt Barreto is Professor of Political Science and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA and the co-founder of the research and polling firm Latino Decisions. Time Magazine called Latino Decisions the “gold-standard in Latino American polling”.

The New York Times

Tim Wallace is a cartographer and Graphics Editor at the New York Times, where he makes visual stories on anything in the news. He has a PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The New York Times Magazine

Jenna Wortham is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times Magazine, where she writes about a wide variety of topics. She is also co-host of the New York Times podcast ‘Still Processing’.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kathy Cramer is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.”

Founding Partner, Stagwell Group

Mark Penn is a former political strategist, consultant, and author. He was the former Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft and has consulted for former President Bill Clinton, as well as many other political leaders.

Fordham University

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is an Assistant Professor in the Communication and Media Studies Department at Fordham University. Her work has centered around issues of political participation, citizenship, and political campaigns.

Indiana University

Bernard Fraga is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, where his research focuses on American electoral politics, racial and ethnic politics, and political behavior. His latest work seeks to explain historical and contemporary racial/ethnic differences in voter turnout.

MIT

Ariel White is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT where she studies voting and voting rights. Her work uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2016.

L2

Paul Westcott is the Director of Marketing and Communications for L2. Prior to joining L2, Paul worked for NBC News, Fox News Channel and most recently Clear Channel Media and Entertainment.

Civis Analytics

Matt Lackey is VP of Research and Development at Civis Analytics, a political data science firm. Previously he led the analytics team at the AFL-CIO from 2009 to 2013, and worked on the 2008 Obama campaign.

Founder, Bold

Carrie Sheffield is founder of the new media company Bold. A senior contributor for Opportunity Lives, she wrote editorials for The Washington Times, covered Congress for Politico, and The Hill and economic policy at Forbes. She earned a Master's in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and analyzed the municipal bond market for Goldman Sachs.

Visiting Scholar, Harvard / VP, San Antonio Spurs

Kirk Goldsberry is a sport and political geographer and writer specializing in spatial reasoning, visual communication and representation. He is a former visiting scholar at Harvard University.

Harvard University

Stephen Pettigrew is a PhD candidate in the Harvard Department of Government. His primary research interests are in American politics and political methodology. His dissertation focuses on problems related to administering elections in the US. In his spare time he covers sports analytics for several online publications.