39 Facts About Mark Penn

Mark J Penn was born on January 15,1954 and is an American businessman, pollster, political strategist, and author.

Mark Penn was formerly chief strategy officer of Microsoft Corporation and chief executive officer of Burson-Marsteller.

Mark Penn was a chief strategist and pollster in the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign.

Mark Penn later became a defender of Donald Trump, opposing his impeachment, consulting on his 2020 presidential campaign, and alleging a "deep state" conspiracy against him.

Mark Penn was born in New York City and raised in Riverdale.

Mark Penn's father, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a kosher poultry-plant owner, who died when Penn was 10 years old.

Mark Penn was raised by his mother Blanche, who worked as a schoolteacher.

Mark Penn graduated from Horace Mann School in New York City in 1972.

At Harvard, Mark Penn majored in political science and, as a city editor of the Harvard Crimson, wrote and reported 90 articles.

In 1977, with the campaign against Mario Cuomo for the Democratic nomination in full swing, Mark Penn sought a way to conduct polls more quickly than the mainframe and punched card system he and Schoen were making use of at Columbia University.

Mark Penn purchased a self-assembled "microcomputer" kit and created a program that could compile polls in a fraction of the time than had been done before.

Mark Penn played a significant role in Koch's campaign during the 1985 New York City mayoral election, for which he and Schoen developed direct mailings, set up phone banks, organized volunteers and canvassers, and coordinated fundraising.

In 1978, Mark Penn conducted polling for the presidential campaign of Luis Herrera Campins in Venezuela.

Mark Penn helped the campaign develop the slogan "Ya Basta," or "Enough," critical of the incumbent party's spending policies.

Since 1979, Mark Penn's firm has helped elect more than a half dozen heads of state in Latin America, including Venezuela's Carlos Andres Perez, Belisario Betancur and Virgilio Barco Vargas of Colombia, and Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Republic.

Mark Penn has been a strategic advisor to Bill Gates and Microsoft since the mid-1990s.

Mark Penn began working with Microsoft when the company faced antitrust litigation initiated by the US Department of Justice.

Mark Penn created the famous "blue sweater" advertisement that featured Gates, which were intended to restore trust in the company amid the antitrust litigation.

In July 2012, Mark Penn was named Corporate Vice President for Strategic and Special Projects at Microsoft Corporation.

In February 2022, Penn announced the formation of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud.

Mark Penn tested many different scenarios for Clinton, and in each case the research showed that the American public would back the President and blame Republicans if the government shut down.

Mark Penn created the "NeuroPersonality Poll," a survey that blended standard political and demographic questions with lifestyle, attitudinal, and psychographic questions, some adapted from Myers-Briggs.

Mark Penn subsequently became famous for focusing on the "soccer mom", cited as the key swing vote that helped Clinton get reelected in 1996.

Mark Penn subsequently led the research effort monitoring Clinton's level of public support throughout the impeachment proceedings against him and until Clinton was acquitted on February 13,1999.

In 2000, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton asked Mark Penn to advise her on her run for the US Senate from New York.

Mark Penn served again as Clinton's pollster in her successful 2006 Senate reelection campaign.

Mark Penn laid out his "strategy for winning" in a March 19,2007, memo to the campaign.

Mark Penn wrote the "3 AM" advertisement that ran during the campaign, which was later named one of Times top 10 political ads of all time and was parodied on The Simpsons.

In May 2008, Times Karen Tumulty wrote that Mark Penn thought the Democratic primaries were "winner-take-all", rather than allotted proportionally, citing anonymous sources who attended a Clinton strategy session with Mark Penn in 2007.

Mark Penn advised British prime minister Tony Blair and conducted polling during his successful campaign for an unprecedented third term in 2005.

Mark Penn argues that a mere one percent of the American public can create a "microtrend" capable of launching a major business or even a new cultural movement, changing commercial, political and social landscapes.

Philippe Reines suggested that Mark Penn shouldered too much of the blame for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential defeat.

Mark Penn published several columns which criticized Mueller and political and legal adversaries of Trump.

The Daily Beast wrote that Mark Penn had become one of Trump's biggest defenders in 2018.

Mark Penn has used the term "deep state" to refer to what he characterizes as Democratic operatives within the government who seek to undermine and sabotage Trump's first presidency.

Mark Penn has alleged that Rod Rosenstein, who served as deputy attorney general in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019, had conflicts of interest that should have precluded his involvement in investigations into Trump.

Mark Penn met with Trump in February and November 2019 to discuss Trump's re-election campaign.

In 2025, Mark Penn praised Twitter as a "a revived and increasingly vibrant platform".

Mark Penn is married to Nancy Jacobson, the co-founder, board president and CEO of No Labels, a 5014 political organization that publicly claims to advocate for centrism and bipartisanship.