After college at Longwood University and before law school at Catholic University, Mike Burns spent four years getting a first-hand look at what it takes to get people to vote. He managed Gerry Connelly's 2007 campaign for re-election to lead the biggest county in the Northern Virginia suburbs, a year before the Democrat won his seat in Congress. Then he became executive director of the Fairfax County Democratic Party. Now, rather than running campaigns, he's working to help more students vote as national director of the Fair Elections Center's Campus Vote Project. His answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
We work with universities, community colleges, faculty, students and election officials to reduce barriers to student voting. Our goal is to help campuses institutionalize reforms that empower students with the information they need to register and vote.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
When I was in high school, we had a history-government class requirement that you had to complete a certain number of hours engaging in the political process. I put up signs for a candidate: Barry for Sheriff. I remember because my best friend's name was Barry and we got a real kick out of this. I attended some debates and forums for local elections, distributed campaign literature door-to-door and made phone calls for a state House race. I did not realize it at the time, but I see now it is an ingenious way to introduce young people not just to the offices, candidates and issues — but also to how they engage with the local community.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
I feel particularly proud whenever a young person who has worked with us goes on to do amazing things. Campus Vote Project has built is always looking to improve the leadership development of the student leaders we engage in this work. I could not be prouder that we have hired two of them as full-time staff. This is essentially my retirement strategy. As we keep creating leadership stepping stones, eventually someone who started out in a student role with CVP will take over my position in the national office.
And your most disappointing setback?
Every time I read a headline that says young people are "apathetic" or portrays them as non-voters. Young people have always been at the center of social movements in this country — from the civil rights and anti-war movements of yesterday to the March for Our Lives and climate change activism of today. I have the privilege of working with students at the forefront of the continuing fight for voting rights and a democracy that includes everyone. And it disappoints me when older folks in positions of power distort this narrative instead of showcasing young leaders and working to build them up.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
I am a middle-aged white guy with a law degree so I have to be cognizant of that privilege every day in my job. I am constantly amazed by the tremendous CVP staff and our student Democracy Fellows and the array of identities, backgrounds and lived experiences they bring to our efforts. As a manager of such a diverse group, it is incumbent on me to continually learn and make space for us as an organization to go beyond just diversity and address equity and inclusion.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Hope for the best and plan for the worst. After law school I regularly took to describing myself as not "risk averse," but just "very risk aware." The corollary to this is that I think my staff is probably sick of me using the phrase "How do we set them up for success?" every time we plan something new.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Healthy DemocraSea — chocolate fro-yo with sea salt and caramel.
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
"Veep." It was laugh out loud funny because all the jokes and bits started with a kernel of truth and then took them to their absurd extreme. Unfortunately, our current political climate has also taken itself to such extremes that they could no longer come up with new material that would still be funny.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
I have an 11-week-old son, and we track on an app how much he eats, sleeps and does other things. So usually the last thing is listening to a podcast with my headphones while I put his nighttime feeding into the app.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
Oh my. I am an unabashed voting rights activist who constantly works to convince young people and students that their vote matters. But I do not have a perfect voting record. I have a December birthday so I just missed my first chance to participate in an election at the end of high school. But in Virginia there are elections every year — state and local in the odd-years along with federal in even years. And my first year of college was an off-off year in Virginia — i.e. no statewide races for governor, lieutenant governor or attorney general, just state legislature and local. I totally missed this and did not think to get an absentee ballot and vote until the following year when it was a presidential election. I started working on campaigns and for voting rights ever since to make up for this.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.