Why read Tusk?
What is going on with the two major American political parties? How did Democrats manage to fire their under-performing nominee in 2024 while Republicans doubled down with theirs? Do the parties have entirely different logic when it comes to picking nominees? Just who is in charge of the parties — voters, leaders, elected officials, billionaires, or someone else? What can we learn from all this?
This Substack seeks to answer these questions and more. I began it in early 2023 with an eye toward providing insights on the early stages of the Republican presidential nomination cycle. I’m using some of this material to inform a book I’m writing about the Republican Party for Cambridge University Press. In 2025, I continue with efforts to understand both major parties, with (roughly) weekly posts.
If you’ve read my book Learning From Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020 or any of the related FiveThirtyEight articles, Mischiefs of Faction posts, or tweets I did along the way, you’ll find this approach somewhat familiar. This is political science in real time. And I’ll be drawing from interviews I’m conducting in Iowa, New Hampshire, and elsewhere, ongoing surveys of county party chairs, and other sources in the process.
I hope you’ll find this helpful and informative. And I hope you can help support this site with a donation, but you’re more than welcome to this content if you can’t.
About me
I am a professor in the Political Science Department and director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. I’ve been at the university since 2004. During the 2024-25 academic year, I am on sabbatical serving as the senior visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. I also do a lot of public facing work at places like Politico, the Los Angeles Times, the Denver Post, and more. I also tweet a lot. You can read more about my work on my website.
My preferred style of political science research involves a number of different approaches, including interviews, historical readings, attending political events, as well as more quantitative studies of campaign finance patterns and voting behavior. I mainly focus on political parties, which are both everywhere and also tricky to study, since a lot of their most important functions are off the books.
I grew up in Southern California, lived and worked for several years in Washington, DC, and am now based in Denver, Colorado. I enjoy skiing, baking, and decorating cakes.
