Perry Bacon, Jr. is a veteran political journalist and commentator. He is currently an on-air analyst for MSNBC and political editor for NBC’s theGrio.com.
Previously, Perry has covered presidential campaigns, the White House and Congress for the Washington Post and Time Magazine. While at the Post, Perry covered the Obama White House and the rise of the Tea Party.
Perry regularly speaks about politics on national television, including appearances on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and CNN’s “Larry King Live,” as well as universities, including George Washington and Yale.
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Bacon first worked in Washington on the Metro staff of the Washington Post, before joining Time Magazine’s Washington bureau. There, he covered the 2002, 2004 and 2006 elections. He followed the rise and fall of Howard Dean, then the failed run of John Kerry. He extensively wrote about the 2006 midterm elections, including a widely-read profile of then House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
He moved to the Post in early 2007, where he was one of the lead writers on the campaign trail, following a number of candidates throughout the race and writing influential pieces about then-Senator Obama, as well as on the importance of race and religion in the 2008 primaries. He interviewed nearly all of the major candidates in the 2008 race.
Bacon graduated with a degree in political science from Yale University.