Picking Winners

Lawrence R. Jacobs is an American political scientist and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance (CSPG) at the University of Minnesota. He is the McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science and the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies in Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Jacobs has written or edited, alone or collaboratively, 17 books and over 100 scholarly articles in addition to numerous reports and media essays on American democracy, national and Minnesota elections, political communications, health care reform, and economic inequality. His latest book is Democracy under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance and, in 2020, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Desmond King is the Andrew W Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Nuffield

College. His books include Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government; The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation; Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (with Stephen Skowronek and John A. Dearborn); Fed Power: How Finance Wins (with Lawrence R. Jacobs); Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama's America (with Rogers M. Smith); and America's New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair (with Rogers M. Smith). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the National Academy of Sciences.