Politics & Polls #161: Florida Politics Featuring Andrew Gillum

Nov 13 2019
By B. Rose Kelly
Source Woodrow Wilson School
Florida will be a key state in the 2020 presidential election, and one Mayor Andrew Gillum hopes will flip blue. In this episode, he chats with Julian Zelizer about his run for governor and his current efforts to mobilize voters in Florida. 
 
Gillum is currently chair of Forward Florida Action, a voter registration organization working to build a vibrant, inclusive democracy that works for all Florida communities. He has been involved in public affairs for more than 15 years — when he was 23 years old, he became the youngest person elected to the Tallahassee City Commission.
 
As city commissioner, he championed restorative justice programs and established partnerships to secure funding for computers and internet access for middle school students. As mayor, he spearheaded the construction of a 20-megawatt solar farm, giving thousands of residents reliable clean, renewable energy. Following his run for governor, Gillum was honored as one of the EBONY Power 100 and named a 2019 resident fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
 
 

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Wang is a professor at Princeton University, appointed in neuroscience with affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. An alumnus of Caltech, where he received a B.S. with honors in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. He has also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is noted for his application of data analytics and poll aggregation to American politics. He is leading an effort at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to build a 50-state data resource for legislative-quality citizen redistricting. His work to define a state-level legal theory to limit partisan gerrymandering recently won Common Cause’s Gerrymandering Standard Writing Contest. His neuroscience research concerns how the brain learns from sensory experience in early life, adulthood and autism.

Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He has written more than 900 op-eds, including his popular weekly column for CNN.com and The Atlantic. This year, he is the distinguished senior fellow at the New York Historical Society, where he is writing a biography of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for Yale University's Jewish Lives Series. He is the author and editor of more than 19 books including, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. In January 2019, Norton published his new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.” In spring 2020, Penguin Press will publish his other book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.” He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and New America.