Election 2020: Who's Going To Win?

With just one month until the November presidential elections, Folio continues its series of critical discussions on the potential outcomes of the election at the national and state level; moderated by noted national commentator and Folio Board Secretary Mort Kondracke.

Who's going to win the Presidency this year, take control of the US Senate and prevail in Washington State races? Our panel of experts, John Lapinski, director of the Elections Unit of NBC News, David Domke, director of CommonPower, a national vote mobilization group based in Seattle,  Sandeep Kaushik, Folio board member and political consultant preview possible outcomes of the national and Washington State elections and Heather Weiner who has more than 25 years of experience in strategic management of election-related projects.

Heather Weiner has more than 25 years of experience in strategic management of issue and election-related projects, including statewide ballot initiative campaigns, member-GOTV, state political action committees, and independent expenditure campaigns. She's helped campaigns from Massachusetts to Nevada win minimum wage increases, civil rights for transgender people, medicaid expansion, and more. Her current clients include Approve R-90, the sex education referendum now on WA's ballot, and Invest in WA Now, a statewide effort to boost WA's economy by investing in public health, small business assistance, and jobs.

John Lapinski, Ph.D., is the Robert A. Fox Professor of Political Science, Faculty Director of the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and the Director of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies. He also serves as the Faculty Director for the Executive Masters of Public Administration program within the Fels Institute of Government and as the Director of the Elections Unit at NBC News. In his role for NBC News, Lapinski is responsible for projecting races for the network and produces election-related stories through exit polls for NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and all of NBC’s digital properties. Dr. Lapinski earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2000, and previously was an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. He came to Penn in 2006. His primary area of research is concerned with understanding national elections as well as lawmaking in Congress through empirical analysis. He is the author of The Substance of Representation (Princeton University Press, 2013) and co-author (with David A. Bateman and Ira Katznelson) of Southern Nation (Princeton University Press, 2018).

David Domke is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, and for the past decade he has served as Department Chair. His research has focused on communication, politics, and public opinion in the United States, and in recent years Domke has worked closely with several organizations on communication and engagement in the public arena. In 2018 he worked with a team to launch CommonPower, and he now serves as its Director of Fieldwork & Learning.

Sandeep Kaushik is a political and public affairs consultant in Seattle, and a partner at Sound View Strategies (SVS). Prior to that he worked as a political columnist/writer for Seattle’s alt-weekly, the Stranger, and as Seattle correspondent for Time Magazine and the Boston Globe. Sandeep currently serves on the board of the Downtown Emergency Services Center and on the Folio board. He lives in Seattle’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood with his wife and two children.