Mark Baldassare is survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he holds the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Public Policy. For the previous 15 years, he also served as president and CEO of PPIC. Prior to that, he served as PPIC’s director of research. He is a leading expert on public opinion and survey methodology, and has directed the PPIC Statewide Survey since 1998. He is an authority on elections, voter behavior, and political and fiscal reform, authoring ten books and numerous reports on these topics. He often provides testimony before legislative committees and state commissions. Before joining PPIC, he was a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of California, Irvine, where he held the Johnson Chair in Civic Governance. He has conducted surveys for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the California Business Roundtable. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Carla Marinucci is the senior writer for POLITICO’s California Playbook. She has consistently been named one of California’s leading political writers and for the last two years has been honored as the state’s top digital influencer in political reporting. Prior to launching the POLITICO California Playbook in 2015, she was senior political writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and political editor for the San Francisco Examiner. She has covered six presidential elections and seven California gubernatorial elections since 1996, including the historic recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2013, she was honored by the Society of Professional Journalists with a lifetime achievement award for her coverage of California politics.

Jennifer Medina is a national politics reporter with the New York Times, covering political attitudes and power, with a focus on the West. A Southern California native, she spent several years reporting on the region for the National desk. During her time in California, her reporting focused on immigration, education, and poverty. Since joining the Times in 2002, she has also covered politics in New York and Connecticut, and spent several years writing about New York City public schools. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in print journalism and political science.

Seema Mehta is a political writer for the Los Angeles Times who has covered the presidential campaigns since 2008, as well as multiple gubernatorial, senate, and mayoral races. She started at the Times in 1998. She was a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan for the 2018–19 academic year, studying automation and AI and their impacts on voters in the midwest. She is a graduate of Syracuse University.