Raymond J. La Raja is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a nonresident senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings, and co-founder and co-director of the UMass Poll, which does comprehensive national surveys of American voters. He is a co-author of “Small Donors in US Politics: Myth and Reality” (U. Chicago Press, 2026), "Race, Class and Representation in Local Politics" (Cambridge U. Press 2020), and "Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail" (U. Michigan Press 2015).