Ruy Teixeira (; born December 15, 1951) is an American political scientist and commentator who has written several books on various topics in political science and political strategy. He is most noted for his work on political demography, and particularly for The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), which he co-wrote with John Judis, a book arguing that the Democratic Party are demographically destined to become a majority party in the United States of the early 21st century. He writes and edits the weblog The Democratic Strategist. Life and career Teixeira was born in Washington, D.C. to Bernardo and Marie (née Overmeyer) Teixeira. He has one older sibling, Diogo Teixeira, a businessman, and one younger half-brother, Bernardo de Albergaria, a marketing executive. Teixeira's parents were divorced when he was quite young, and he grew up strongly influenced by his mother, who was an artist, painter, and teacher. Teixeira skipped a grade in junior high and graduated from Bethesda Chevy Chase High School at the age of 16. After high school, he attended Yale College and the University of Michigan, from which he received his B.A. (1977). Later, he received his M.S. and Ph.D. (1984) in sociology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he did his dissertation on declining voter turnout. After graduate school, he moved to New York and worked for a polling firm for a year before moving down to Washington to do consulting work, chiefly at Abt Associates. In 1987, his dissertation was published as the book, Why Americans Don’t Vote by Greenwood Press. The book was well received and led to several writing assignments in Public Opinion Quarterly and The New Republic on the role of voter turnout in the 1988 election. The articles were widely cited as showing definitively that increased voter turnout was not the solution to the Democrats’ electoral woes—a hotly debated thesis at that time within the Democratic Party. He left consulting after several years and moved over to a government job at the Economic Research Service where he researched labor market issues, chiefly the so-called skills mismatch between low-skilled and high-skilled workers. From there, he moved as a visiting fellow to the Brookings Institution, where in 1992 he published the book, The Disappearing American Voter, now a standard reference work on voter turnout. Afterwards, he moved to the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council, to start a