The Aspen Institute

Featuring Rachel Bitecofer, senior fellow of elections at the Niskanen Center, and Tamara Keith, NPR White House correspondent, in conversation with Dan Glickman, executive director of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program. Bitecofer accurately predicted the 2018 midterm elections with a revolutionary new theory: swing voters matter far less than most experts think. Instead, turning out new voters drives election results. With Keith’s vast knowledge of each candidate’s campaign and policies and Bitecofer’s predictive model, the panel will attempt to answer whether this theory will hold true in the 2020 Presidential election.

Virtual Event

Rachel Bitecofer is a senior fellow of elections at the Niskanen Center and assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, where she teaches classes on political behavior, elections, & political analysis and conducts survey research and elections analysis. Her research has been featured in many media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, NPR, and she is a contracted commentator on CBC Radio. Her book, The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election (Palgrave McMillan) is available via Amazon.  Her innovative election forecasting model predicted the 2018 midterms five months before Election Day, far ahead of other forecasting methods. Her forecasting work argues that American elections have become increasingly nationalized and highly predictable; with partisanship serving as an identity-based, dominant vote determinant for all but a small portion of Americans.

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. Keith has chronicled the Trump administration from day one, putting this unorthodox presidency in context for NPR listeners, from early morning tweets to executive orders and investigations.In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association. In 2011, Keith conceived of and solely reported “The Road Back To Work,” a year-long series featuring the audio diaries of six people in St. Louis who began the year unemployed and searching for work. Keith earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree at the UCB Graduate School of Journalism. Keith is part of the Politics Monday team on the PBS NewsHour, a weekly segment rounding up the latest political news.

Dan Glickman is Vice President of the Aspen Institute and Executive Director of The Aspen Institute Congressional Program. He also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center where he is co-chair of its Democracy Project. Prior to joining the Aspen Institute, he served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton Administration. He also represented the 4th Congressional district of Kansas for 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives where he was very involved in federal farm policy on the House Agriculture Committee. He also served on the House Judiciary Committee, the House Science Committee, and as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In addition, he is the former chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. and former director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.