Jay Cost

Jay Cost is a conservative political historian, journalist, and elections analyst,who writes for The Weekly Standard and National Review. Cost previously wrote "HorseRaceBlog" at RealClearPolitics. Cost has written widely on the Founding and civic virtues, political parties, and the influence of big business in American politics, and is the author of the upcoming The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy as well as the earlier A Republic No More and Spoiled Rotten.

Cost received a B.A. in Government from the University of Virginia, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D in political science from the University of Chicago. Cost currently serves as a part-time professor at Robert Morris University.

In 2005, while working on his dissertation at the University of Chicago, Cost joined the staff of RealClearPolitics. Cost became a writer for The Weekly Standard in 2010. Although his education background is in political science, Cost claims that he has come to rely more on his reading of the history of American elections than on political science and public opinion polling. In 2012 Cost released a book, Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, in which Cost argued that the Democratic Party has been taken over by interest groups. In 2012, Cost repeatedly called Barack Obama the underdog in the 2012 presidential election. Barack Obama ultimately won the election, and PPP's Tom Jensen and New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait criticized Cost's skepticism of the polls.He left the Republican Party in 2016 when the party refused to prevent Donald Trump from obtaining the nomination at the convention.