Peter K. Enns is a Professor of Government and a Professor of Public Policy at Cornell University and the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. He is Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at Verasight. His research focuses on public opinion and political representation, mass incarceration and the legal system, and data science. He generated the most accurate 2020 and 2024 U.S. presidential election forecasts, correctly predicting every state more than 100 days before the election. He is PI of the NSF-funded Collaborative Midterm Survey, co-PI of the NIH-funded Autism Replication, Validation, and Reproducibility (AR2) Center, and on the Advisory Board of the American National Election Studies
Enns has published three books—Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence (winner of The Gladys M. Kammerer Award, presented by the American Political Science Association to honor the best book published during the previous year in the field of U.S. national policy), Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (winner of the American Association for Public Opinion Research Best Book Award), and Who Gets Represented?—and dozens of academic articles and op-eds. His research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, FWD.us, Koch Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation. In 2017, he received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section of the American Political Science Association, presented to the top scholar in the field within ten years of her or his doctorate.
Enns has served on the Advisory Board of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, Cornell’s Generative AI Advisory Council, Cornell’s Data Services Management Council, as Faculty Director and Board Member of Cornell’s Prison Education Program, team leader of the Institute for Social Science theme project on the Causes, Consequences, and Future of Mass Incarceration in the United States, on the Provost’s Data Science Task Force, the Provost’s Committee on Social Science Organizational Structures, and the Committee to Design the Cornell’s Brooks School of Public Policy.
He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his undergraduate degree from Colorado College. Prior to graduate school, he taught high school in Baltimore, MD, through Teach For America. He grew up in Canton, NY and Kingsburg, CA.
Peter K. Enns is a Professor of Government and a Professor of Public Policy at Cornell University and the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. He is Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at Verasight. His research focuses on public opinion and political representation, mass incarceration and the legal system, and data science. He generated the most accurate 2020 and 2024 U.S. presidential election forecasts, correctly predicting every state more than 100 days before the election. He is PI of the NSF-funded Collaborative Midterm Survey, co-PI of the NIH-funded Autism Replication, Validation, and Reproducibility (AR2) Center, and on the Advisory Board of the American National Election Studies
Enns has published three books—Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence (winner of The Gladys M. Kammerer Award, presented by the American Political Science Association to honor the best book published during the previous year in the field of U.S. national policy), Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (winner of the American Association for Public Opinion Research Best Book Award), and Who Gets Represented?—and dozens of academic articles and op-eds. His research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, FWD.us, Koch Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation. In 2017, he received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section of the American Political Science Association, presented to the top scholar in the field within ten years of her or his doctorate.
Enns has served on the Advisory Board of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, Cornell’s Generative AI Advisory Council, Cornell’s Data Services Management Council, as Faculty Director and Board Member of Cornell’s Prison Education Program, team leader of the Institute for Social Science theme project on the Causes, Consequences, and Future of Mass Incarceration in the United States, on the Provost’s Data Science Task Force, the Provost’s Committee on Social Science Organizational Structures, and the Committee to Design the Cornell School of Public Policy.
He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his undergraduate degree from Colorado College. Prior to graduate school, he taught high school in Baltimore, MD, through Teach For America. He grew up in Canton, NY and Kingsburg, CA.