Join us on November 12, 2024, for a live GSPM Mastering the Room Podcast recording titled, Winners, Losers, and Surprises: Breaking Down the 2024 Election with host Dr. Casey Burgat, Associate Professor and Director of the Legislative Affairs Master's Program within The Graduate School of Political Management. Dr. Burgat will be joined by a bipartisan panel with pollsters & political experts Whit Ayres and Mark Mellman as they unpack the pivotal moments of the 2024 election. The conversation will cover key topics such as election tipping points, surprises, polling accuracy, voter sentiment, and what the results mean for governing in 2025 and beyond. Don’t miss this insightful analysis of the election’s outcomes and implications!

About the Speakers

Casey Burgat is the director of the Legislative Affairs program at the Graduate School of Political Management and host of its Mastering the Room podcast. Prior to joining GSPM, Dr. Burgat was a Senior Governance Fellow at the R Street Institute where his research focused on issues of congressional capacity and reform. In this role, Casey wrote regularly for both scholarly and journalistic publications, including CNN, the Washington Post, and Politico, and appeared on a variety of television and radio outlets. Dr. Burgat coauthored Congress Explained: Representation and Lawmaking in the First Branch, a textbook on all things Congress, published by the Sage/CQ Press in the fall of 2022.

Previously, Casey worked at the Congressional Research Service, where he served in the Executive Branch Operations and the Congress & Judiciary sections. There, he was responsible for responding to congressional requests about federal rulemaking, issues of congressional reform, the president’s role in federal budgeting, federal advisory committees, and congressional staffing.

Casey is a graduate of Arizona State University, with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He also holds a master’s in political management from George Washington University and received his doctorate in government and politics from the University of Maryland, College Park, where his dissertation focused on the impacts of congressional staff.

Dr. Whit Ayres is the President of North Star Opinion Research, a national public opinion and public affairs research firm located in Alexandria, Virginia, that provides research and strategic advice for corporations, associations, and Republican candidates for public office. Roll Call, a widely-read newspaper on Capitol Hill, called the firm “one of the best in the nation.”

Ayres’ comments and analysis appear in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and numerous regional newspapers. He also appears periodically on Fox News, CNN, and National Public Radio.

Before establishing the firm, Ayres served as Senior Executive Assistant for Budget and Policy to Governor Carroll Campbell in South Carolina. He has also served as a tenured member of the political science faculty at the University of South Carolina.

Ayres graduated cum laude from Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, with a major in political science. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mark Mellman is one of the nation’s leading public opinion researchers and communication strategists. He is CEO of The Mellman Group, a polling and consulting firm whose clients include leading political figures, Fortune 500 companies, and some of the nation’s most important public interest groups. Mellman has helped guide the campaigns of some sixteen U.S. Senators, eight Governors and over two dozen Members of Congress, as well as numerous state and local officials.

As a consultant to the Democratic Congressional Leadership, Mellman plays a central role in developing Democratic strategies on a variety of issues. Newsweek credits his work on the environment with helping “turn Bill Clinton green.” The Economist has recognized him as the advisor who was the brains behind the Democrats’ successful “Mediscare” strategy. The firm’s string of upset victories has led the Boston Globe to call The Mellman Group Washington’s “hottest” political consulting firm, and the New Republic describes Mellman as “a leading Democratic technologist.” Capitol Hill’s newspaper, Roll Call, named Mellman one of the most influential people in Washington when it comes to electing candidates to Congress. The Mellman Group was also the only Democratic firm to handle two of the Washington Post’s ten best incumbent campaigns. In 2006, the National Journal named Mellman its “Top Insider” for providing the most accurate predictions of the 2006 election cycle.

Mellman received his undergraduate degree from Princeton, and graduate degrees from Yale University, where he taught in the Political Science department. He has served as a consultant on politics to CBS News, a presidential debate analyst for PBS, and on the faculty of The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. Mellman’s op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, among other leading papers and he writes a weekly column for The Hill, the newspaper for and about Congress. In 2008 Mark Mellman was the recipient of the AAPC Special Board Award for Pollster of the Year.