David Nickerson
Senior Advisor
David is a pioneer in using field experiments to measure the effectiveness of campaign tactics. Over 22 years of work as an academic and practitioner, he has conducted over one thousand field experiments with grassroots organizations, unions, political campaigns, and governments.
He served as the Director of Experiments in the 2012 Obama campaign and played a similar role for the Clinton campaign in 2016.
He was Senior Research Advisor at the Analyst Institute from 2007 to 2013.
David came to Focus for Democracy from Temple University where he was a professor of political science after spending a decade at the University of Notre Dame. Scores of his research articles on voter psychology, campaign behavior, and experimental methods have been published in the most prestigious political science journals. His article on scalable experimental protocols was included in “100 Seminal Papers from the last 100 years of journal publishing by Oxford University Press.”
David, a native of Nebraska, received his PhD from Yale University and now resides with his family in the Philadelphia area.