Henry Olsen

Henry Olsen is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Olsen began his career as apolitical consultant at the California firm of Hoffenblum-Mollrich. After three years working for the California Assembly Republican Caucus, he returned to school to become a lawyer. Following law school he clerked for the Honorable Danny J. Boggs on the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and as an associate in the Philadelphia office of Dechert, Price & Rhoads. He then joined the think tank world where he spent the next eighteen years as an executive at a variety of institutions, serving as the President of the Commonwealth Foundation, a Vice President at the Manhattan Institute, and as Vice President and Director, National Research Initiative, at the American Enterprise Institute. He left AEI in 2013 to pursue a career in political analysis and writing at EPPC. During that time his work has appeared in variety of leading publications in America and the United Kingdom. He is the author or co-author of two books, “The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism” and (with Dante J. Scala) “The Four Faces of the Republican Party”. His biennial election predictions have been widely praised for the uncanny accuracy, and he is a frequent guest on television and radio programs. Olsen regularly speaks about American political trends and global populism in the United State, Europe, and Australia.