Midterms 2022: Who will come out on top?

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.

John Harris is the founder of POLITICO and served as its editor-in-chief until 2019. Harris began his career at The Washington Post, covering politics on the local, state, and national levels. From 1995 to 2001, he covered the Clinton White House. Later, he expanded on his reporting in a history of that presidency, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House. He is also co-author, with his friend and fellow journalist Mark Halperin, of a book on presidential politics, The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008. After 20 years as a reporter, he became an editor, which led him and Jim VandeHei to launch POLITICO, a publication about politics from the ground up. Harris is a member of the Miller Center's Governing Council.

Jennifer Lawless is a Miller Center faculty senior fellow and the Lenore Reeves and George Spicer Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the UVA faculty, she was a professor of government at American University and the director of the Women & Politics Institute. Before that, she was an assistant and then associate professor at Brown University. Lawless’ research focuses on political ambition, campaigns and elections, and media and politics. She is the author or co-author of six books, including Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era (with Danny Hayes) and It Still Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office (with Richard L. Fox). Her research, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation, has appeared in numerous academic journals, and is regularly cited in the popular press.

Clarence Page, the 1989 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary, is a columnist syndicated nationally by Tribune Media Services and a member of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board. Page was also a regular contributor of essays to PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and was a regular on The McLaughlin Group, NBC’s The Chris Matthews Show, ABC’s Nightline, and BET’s Lead Story news panel programs. Page’s accolades include a 1980 Illinois UPI award for community service for an investigative series titled “The Black Tax” and the Edward Scott Beck Award for overseas reporting in 1976. He also received lifetime achievement awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, the Chicago Headline Club, and the National Association of Black Journalists. In 1992, he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame. Page is a member of the Miller Center's Governing Council.

William J. Antholis has served as director and CEO of UVA's Miller Center of Public Affairs since January 2015. In that time, the Miller Center has strengthened its position as the leading nonpartisan research institution on the American presidency and worked with scholars across the University of Virginia to deliver vital research to policymakers and the public. Before coming to the Miller Center, Antholis served as managing director at the Brookings Institution from 2004 to 2014, working directly with Brookings's president and vice presidents. Antholis is the author of Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global (2013) and co-author (with Strobe Talbott) of Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming (2010). He has published articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade.