I am a political scientist who studies American democracy and the forces that shape political representation, participation, and power. My research spans voting rights and electoral institutions, Latino political behavior, race and democracy, and the conceptual and methodological tools scholars use to understand these questions.

My current research is organized around two major areas. One examines voting rights and electoral institutions, including how we should understand and measure electoral opportunity in the changing legal landscape surrounding voting rights. I am particularly interested in questions about what meaningful electoral opportunity entails, what comparisons are appropriate for evaluating it, and how political science can contribute to the study and design of electoral institutions. A second research program examines Latino voting behavior across the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections. Using interpretable machine learning, I study how the factors associated with vote choice have changed across elections, how those patterns differ across groups, and what they can tell us about partisan alignment and electoral change.

A longer-running strand of my research examines race, political inclusion, and the development of American democracy. My book project, Herrenvolk Democracy: Race, Exclusion, and the American Political Order, examines how American democracy developed alongside durable forms of racial exclusion and inequality in political membership and power. Related work develops ways to measure power sharing and democratic inclusion across groups.

Across these projects, I am especially interested in concept formation and measurement. Much of my work begins with concepts that are widely used but not always clearly specified, including electoral opportunity, acculturation, political inclusion, and power sharing. I ask what these concepts actually require, how their dimensions can be made observable, and which empirical strategies allow us to study them well. My research draws on survey analysis, historical and institutional analysis, measurement, and computational methods, including interpretable machine learning.

Background

I was born and raised on Tucson’s South Side and began my college education at Pima Community College before transferring to the University of Arizona, where I earned my BA in Government and Public Policy, magna cum laude, and received the Robie Gold Medal. I later earned my PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame, where I was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

Before joining the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies.