The home stretch: Election 2020 one week out

William Antholis serves as director and CEO of the Miller Center. Immediately prior, he was managing director at The Brookings Institution, and from 1995 to 1999 he served in government. At the White House, he was director of international economic affairs on the staff of the National Security Council and National Economic Council, where he served as the chief staff person for the G8 Summits in 1997 and 1998. Antholis is the author of Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global and, with Strobe Talbot,Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming.

Mary Kate Cary, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, served as a White House speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to early 1992, authoring more than 100 of his presidential addresses. She also has ghostwritten several books related to President Bush’s life and career and served as senior writer for communications for the 1988 Bush-Quayle presidential campaign.

Today, Cary is asked to write speeches, presentations, and reports for a variety of national political, corporate, and nonprofit leaders. Her assignments have included State of the Union responses, Republican National Convention addresses, and TED talks. She served as founding managing editor of the daily political news service The Hotline, as a staffer at ABC News’ This Week with David Brinkley, and as a columnist at U.S. News & World Report.

Ann Compton began her distinguished career in journalism as the first female reporter for the WDBJ TV, a CBS affiliate in Roanoke, before being hired by ABC news in 1973. By the next year, Mrs. Compton became the first woman assigned to cover the White House on a full-time basis by a network television news organization. During her time in the White House, she covered seven different administrations, served on the panel of two presidential debates and covered both Republican and Democratic National conventions in 1976. Compton was the chief Washington correspondent for ABCNEWS.com, in 2000, where she wrote and anchored a daily political column. On September 10, 2014, Compton retired from ABC News, 41 years to the day after she began at the network. Mrs. Compton has earned the respect of both viewers and peers alike, winning an Emmy, a Peabody, and the Silver Baton from the DuPont awards at Columbia University. Ann has been inducted into six Halls of Fame and has received five honorary university degrees.

Paul Freedman (Ph.D. University of Michigan) is associate professor in the department of politics at the University of Virginia. Freedman teaches courses in media, campaigns and elections, research methods, and the politics of food. Freedman serves on the advisory board of the Environmental Thought and Practice major and is Academic Director of the Morven Summer Institute. He is the recipient of the UVA Alumni Board of Trustees Teaching Award and served as the first Edward L. Ayers Advising Fellow. Freedman is co-author of Campaign Advertising and American Democracy (Temple University Press), and his work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, Campaigns and Elections, Hedgehog Review, and Slate.