Weekend Reading is written by Michael Podhorzer and edited by Emily Crockett, with research and editing assistance from Andrea Evans and Thomas Mande, as well as data-wrangling from BlueLabs.

About Mike

Michael Podhorzer is the former political director of the AFL-CIO. He founded the Analyst Institute, the Independent Strategic Research Collaborative (ISRC), the Defend Democracy Project, and the Polling Consortium, and helped found America Votes, Working America, For Our Future, and Catalist.

In 2020, Podhorzer played a pivotal organizing role in the effort to prevent Trump from overturning the election results, and his early leadership in evidence-driven politics was documented in the 2013 book The Victory Lab.

He is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

About Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading began in March 2017 as an off-the-record email newsletter to a group of leading election practitioners. On Sundays, Mike would share his insights on election data, political strategy, and how to respond to the ongoing democratic crises in the Trump era. Over the years, the readership grew more than tenfold. Since retiring from the AFL-CIO, he was able to start this public Substack to share his work more broadly.