About
Mr. Putnam holds a bachelors degree from the University of North Carolina and masters and PhD degrees from the University of Georgia, where his work focused on American politics and methodology. It was in conducting dissertation research on the impetus for presidential primary movement that Mr. Putnam created FrontloadingHQ, a site that ultimately became a nationally known resource for not only the ever-changing presidential primary calendar, but later broadened to include deeper examinations of the wider array of delegate selection rules in both the Democratic and Republican parties. That knowledge, honed both at the site and in a number of academic positions across the southeastern United States (Wake Forest University, Davidson College, Appalachian State University, the University of Georgia, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington) over the last decade opened the door to connections with other academics, but also to political practitioners in both major political parties and members of the national media.
The combination of that network and knowledge has allowed Mr. Putnam to participate in the National Presidential Caucus with national party delegate rules makers on both sides of the aisle. In a time of deep political polarization across the country, those efforts proved not only fruitful but truly bipartisan as the group aimed to tackle persistent problems within the presidential nomination process common in both parties' systems. On the media side, Mr. Putnam partnered with ABC News and also the New Yorker in 2012 and Vox in 2016 to assemble delegate projections models in those nomination races.
At the conclusion of the 2018-19 academic year, Mr. Putnam left academia to pursue other opportunities. It was then, in the fall of 2019, that FHQ Strategies was founded with both political and media operations in mind. On the political side, FHQ Strategies can provide clients in both parties with the same detailed expertise of the nomination process that has made the site FrontloadingHQ a staple in electoral analysis for more than a decade. And on the media side, Mr. Putnam can not only advise clients on those same processes, but also conduct both freelance modeling and writing on those matters.
Among our clients during the 2020 election cycle, FHQ Strategies advised the Biden campaign on delegate strategy before the primaries and later partnered with FiveThirtyEight during the primary season to provide analysis on the evolving primary race.