Perry Bacon, Jr.

Perry Bacon, Jr. grew up in Louisville’s Shively neighborhood and is a nationally recognized and respected journalist. By his senior year at Louisville Male High School, he was working at three papers simultaneously: he served as an editor at Male’s student paper, he covered football and basketball games for the University of Louisville student paper, and interned at The Courier Journal. During his college application process, he was interviewed by Yale alum and future congressman, John Yarmuth, who would later become a close friend.

Bacon eventually graduated from Yale with a BA in political science and since school, he has served as a journalist, political reporter, and on-air analyst for such prestigious news outlets as TIME, The Washington Post, MSNBC, NBC News, and now FiveThirtyEight. Perry was one of the Post’s top reporters for the 2008 campaign and later on Capitol Hill and the White House. He interviewed many of the 2008 candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and traveled with President Obama to Brazil and Chile as a White House Reporter.