Ron Elving
Ron Elving is Senior Editor and Correspondent on the Washington Desk for NPR News, where he is frequently heard as a news analyst and writes regularly for NPR.org.
He is also a professorial lecturer and Executive in Residence in the School of Public Affairs at American University, where he has also taught in the School of Communication. In 2016, he was honored with the University Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in an Adjunct Appointment. He has also taught at George Mason and Georgetown.
He was previously the political editor for USA Today and for Congressional Quarterly. He has been published by the Brookings Institution and the American Political Science Association. He has contributed chapters on Obama and the media and on the media role in Congress to the academic studies Obama in Office 2011, and Rivals for Power, 2013. Ron's earlier book, Conflict and Compromise: How Congress Makes the Law, was published by Simon & Schuster and is also a Touchstone paperback.
During his tenure as manager of NPR's Washington desk from 1999 to 2014, the desk's reporters were awarded every major recognition available in radio journalism, including the Dirksen Award for Congressional Reporting and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 2008, the American Political Science Association awarded NPR the Carey McWilliams Award "in recognition of a major contribution to the understanding of political science."
Ron came to Washington in 1984 as a Congressional Fellow with the American Political Science Association and worked for two years as a staff member in the House and Senate. Previously, he had been state capital bureau chief for The Milwaukee Journal.
He received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and master's degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of California – Berkeley.
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Election denialism has become not only a thing but a movement. And if critics call this an attack on democracy, some election deniers respond by saying the U.S. is not a democracy, it is a republic. -
The attack on the Capitol continues to cast a shadow over Congress as both a building and an institution, as it remains either the subject or subtext of most every political discussion in Washington. -
To secure enough votes in 1994, the ban's sponsors in Congress accepted a "sunset provision" — meaning it would last 10 years but need to be reauthorized. Politics in the U.S. changed. -
In format and style, the second CNN debate was almost a clone of the first. Once again, the emphasis was on finding points of contention and stoking the tension between candidates. -
The candidates' preparation level was high for this event in part because the stakes have risen so far, so fast. -
In this account by the longtime journalist, President Trump appears convinced that the same braggadocio that made him rich and made him president will make the world conform to his own view of it.
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The apparently mixed signals of the moment do not really suggest any further evolution in the president's abortion thinking. They suggest a strategy for confirming whomever the president picks. -
Fifty years ago almost to the day, anti-war activism led to President Lyndon Johnson's downfall. After a lackluster showing in the New Hampshire primary, he announced he would not seek reelection. -
It is true that Trump's tone and manner were more restrained than his famously rousing style on the stump. But a somewhat more sedate delivery does not, in itself, constitute a conciliatory speech. -
Many are surprised to learn that the NRA of generations past worked with the federal government to limit the traffic in guns, for example where ex-convicts or mental patients were involved.
