About me
Norman Ornstein is Vice President of the Matthew Harris Ornstein Memorial Foundation. Created in memory of his late son Matthew, the foundation works to improve the broken mental health system, and, through a summer debate camp for public school kids in the Washington, DC area, promotes the life skills used in policy debate. He was a long-time scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is co-host of the Words Matter podcast. He is also chairman emeritus of the Campaign Legal Center. He was a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University and The Catholic University of America for fifteen years. His professional career has been built around understanding and reforming American political institutions and its election system. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.
Ornstein was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. He was named one of the top 100 global thinkers in 2012 by Foreign Policy Magazine and one of the 250 most influential people in Washington in 2021 by Washingtonian Magazine and has repeated on the list in every year since. He was given the Frank Goodnow award by the American Political Science Association for distinguished service to the profession. His many books include The New York Times bestseller, It's Even Worse Than It Looks with Tom Mann and One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the Not-Yet-Deported (2017) with EJ Dionne and Tom Mann, which was immediately on the New York Times and Washington Post bestseller lists. Ornstein has a BA from the University of Minnesota and an MA and PhD from the University of Michigan.
