Experts

Michael Nelson

Nonresident Faculty Senior Fellow

Fast Facts

  • Editor of American Presidential Elections book series
  • Expertise on political science, Richard Nixon

Areas Of Expertise

  • Governance
  • Elections
  • Federalism
  • Political Parties and Movements
  • Politics
  • The Presidency

Michael Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College. He has published multiple books, including Resilient America: Electing Nixon, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government (2014); The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014, with Sidney Milkis (2015); The Presidency and the Political System, 10th ed. (2014); and The Elections of 2016 (2017). He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as the Journal of Politics and Political Science Quarterly and in periodicals such as Virginia Quarterly Review, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Although most of his articles have been about American politics and government, he also has written about C. S. Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Charles Dickens, Garrison Keillor, football, and baseball. More than 50 of these articles have been reprinted in anthologies of political science, history, and English composition. He is editor of the American Presidential Elections book series for the University Press of Kansas and is currently writing a book about the 1992 election.

Michael Nelson News Feed

In the course of writing the Constitution, the framers got a lot right, which is why, despite a civil war and any number of political crises, it survives as the longest-lasting written plan of government in the world, at 229 years. Still, in celebrating the document, we also need to be honest: It’s far from perfect.
Michael Nelson The New York Times
Miller Center senior fellow Michael Nelson writes in the New York Times about the mistakes of our founding fathers.
Michael Nelson
Nothing degraded Trump’s ability to bring the country together more than his own words and actions as president, which have been designed to unify his base of supporters in opposition to his critics.
Michael Nelson The Hill
It’s one thing not to understand the challenges of a new position. It’s another to ignore the Constitution and the basics of our system, writes the Miller Center's nonresident senior fellow Michael Nelson.
Michael Nelson USA Today
In other important but less remarked-on ways, Trump has been about what one would expect any Republican president to be at the hundred-day mark. That doesn’t make him any less unusual; it just means that he is not completely unusual.
Michael Nelson USA Today
All four presidents from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton whose administrations’ histories have been published as part of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program either faced a challenge or launched an initiative during their first year in office relating to the expansion of opportunity in the service of greater social and economic mobility.
Michael Nelson Miller Center