He earned his undergraduate degree in government at Harvard in 1994, and then a masters followed by a PhD from New York University in politics in 2005.
[1] In 1992 while he was a student at Harvard he ran as a Republican candidate for a seat in the Massachusetts State Legislature[1][2] and lost.
[3] After graduating from Harvard he worked as a research assistant at Harvard, then for the French Ministry of Social Affairs, then for a public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, then as an editor for politics at Adweek, and started a consulting firm called XVOTE.
[1] While he was at NYU he worked for a year as an APSA Congressional Fellow for Senator Hillary Clinton.
[5] He is the editor-in-chief of American Politics Research[6] and has been a member of the decision desk team at NBC since 2006.