I am a political scientist and methodologist studying democracy, voting rights, and political behavior, with a focus on race and political power in the United States. My research also develops approaches for political measurement and computational methods. I am currently the Guinier Project Postdoctoral Fellow at the Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.

I approach democracy as shared rule among those subject to political authority and pluralism as a universal condition of political life. In Who Shares in Governing?, I examine the degree to which governing power is shared as an important dimension of democratic quality. I develop the Shared Power Index using V-Dem data to assess governing inclusion, equal civil standing, and protection from state violence.

My book project, Herrenvolk Democracy: Race, Power, and the American Political Order, asks how the United States has struggled to transform its herrenvolk political order and what that struggle reveals about the possibilities and limits of multiracial democracy. Drawing on systematic historical measurement, I interpret American democratization through the construction, transformation, and persistence of a racial political order. The book examines two openings for multiracial democracy during Reconstruction and the civil-rights era. I argue that the second opening substantially transformed American politics, although consolidation remains unfinished.

In The Supreme Court’s Empirical Regime, I trace forty years of voting-rights jurisprudence to examine how the Court has developed prescriptions governing empirical inquiry about race and representation. These prescriptions shape how race and party must be distinguished, which counterfactual comparisons count, and how historical evidence is treated. I investigate how this regime is reshaping political science and how the discipline should respond, particularly following Callais, while maintaining independent standards of evidence and inference. Alongside this research, my work at the Houston Institute explores responses to gerrymandering, alternative voting systems including proportional representation, and institutional and state-level reforms that could make governing power more broadly shared.

My research on Latino politics examines racialization, acculturation, and differences in political attitudes and behavior among Latinos. Using survey data and machine learning, I identify the issues and attitudes that distinguish Latino voters who supported Donald Trump from those who supported other presidential candidates in 2016, 2020, and 2024. My methodological research also asks how computational approaches can advance substantive understanding. Current projects develop approaches to interpreting random forests beyond variable importance and to using cluster analysis for political measurement and theory development.

Recent Research

• The Invisible Majority: Rethinking Acculturation and Incorporation — Forthcoming in Politics, Groups, and Identities.
• What Structures Political Behavior? Evidence from Latino Voters, 2016–2024 — APSA Preprints, posted November 9, 2026.

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.