Cliston Brown

Cliston Brown is a political analyst and communications executive. He writes on U.S. politics at ClistonBrown.com, having previously written for the New York Observer and the California Globe. Additionally, he was a regularly scheduled weekly guest (“Listen to Cliston”) on The Hal Ginsberg Morning Show on Radio Monterey, and also has appeared on “Inside Story” on Al Jazeera English; A News (Istanbul, Turkey) with Andy Boyns, Zaviar Ahmed and Mark Mourad Hammami; India Ahead with Neha Khanna; “Left, Right, Center” with David Webb on the Sirius XM Patriot Channel; “The DeMaio Report” with Carl DeMaio on KOGO-600 AM San Diego; the CY Interview with Chris Yandek and Jay Bildstein; and “Millennial Talk” with Chelsea Krost. He has been mentioned in the Boston Herald, Newsweek, The New Republic, The Huffington Post, in Reason magazine’s “Hit and Run” blog and on Vox.com, among others, and he has spoken before numerous business and trade groups on U.S. elections.

Brown has had particular success in pinpointing key Congressional races and projecting the number of seats won by each of the major political parties every two years starting in 2006.

On average, Brown has projected the final composition of the U.S. House of Representatives within 7.5 seats and the U.S. Senate within 1.222 seats. In the most recent election, he correctly predicted every U.S. Senate race.

In the 2012 election, Brown correctly called 49 of the 50 states in the presidential race, missing only President Obama’s razor-thin victory in Florida. He also called the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House within one seat of their final compositions.

Brown began his career as a journalist in the Chicago area in 1994, covering government and politics, intellectual property law, international business issues, education, and law enforcement. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 2001, where he served for two years as director of communications for U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Indiana), then transitioned back into the private sector as a communications professional and political analyst in the insurance industry, holding positions in Washington, Chicago and San Francisco.

A Midwesterner born and raised in the Northwest Indiana suburbs of Chicago, Brown currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, and graduated from Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana.

Follow Brown on Twitter: @clistonbrown.