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I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University and the Director of the Institute of Politics at FSU. My research focuses on political institutions and specifically on political parties and their role in electoral politics. In particular, I study the role of parties in shaping the field of candidates and controlling the outcomes of political primaries and nominations for the US House and Senate. I am also interested in how the contextual political environment, especially aspects such as race, ethnicity, and immigration, shape political behaviors and outcomes. I am the author of The Party's Primary: Control of Congressional Nominations which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. My work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and other academic journals. Full information about my publications is available on my CV.
As a scholar, I am associated with Laboratories of Democracy, a non-profit research organization of political scientists that collaborates with local and state officials on field experimental research and have acted as a co-principal investigator of the 2016 American Municipal Official Survey -- a survey of U.S. local officials that employs survey experiments as a means to study elected public officials. In 2017, I was the principal investigator of the American Political Journalism Survey.
Before coming to Florida State I was on faculty at Cornell College, a small liberal arts college in Iowa. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2012. I graduated from Pomona College in 2007 where I also majored in Politics. While in college, I worked full time as a political operative during the 2004 and 2006 election cycles on campaigns in Maine and Minnesota.
I grew up in Winterport, Maine.