About
Forrest Williams
Strategic Campaign Operations
Creator of data-driven strategies to tackle complex challenges. Building tools that strengthen outreach, clarify messaging, and improve how campaigns connect with supporters.
Experience
Deputy Data Director
Harris for President - Coordinated Campaign | Phoenix, AZ | May 2024 - November 2024
Analytics: Built detailed reports, visualizations, and dashboards on historical voting trends, turnout patterns, and county vote tally cadences that updated in real time. Conducted precinct performance and outstanding ballot analysis to guide targeted canvassing and ballot cure efforts during and after election.
GIS: Managed all GIS and mapping priorities across campaign departments, aggregating voter data (party affiliation, support scores, past voter behavior) along precinct, county, legislative district, and tribal land levels. Developed a Voronoi-based model to identify vote centers serving the most registered voters, directing the strategic allocation of 1,863 credentialed poll observers.
Election Administration: Created a standardized database of Arizona’s 1000+ voting and dropbox locations for administering iwillvote.com. Produced reports for legal team to identify voting location coverage gaps, successfully advocating County Boards to open new polling sites in remote tribal areas of Navajo County and extend early voting at UofA and NAU campuses.
Political Coalitions: Provided insights on Latino, Black, Native, and Mormon voters to guide coalition-building and outreach, and directing event placement and high-profile surrogates to relevant areas across the state.
Investigations Analyst
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census | New York, NY | March 2019 - March 2023
Applied risk assessment methodologies in the adjudication of federal background investigations for Public Trust and National Security roles per 5 CFR §731 and E.O. 12968. Supervised the pre-employment vetting recommendations of a 40-person analyst team, providing final approval to ensure legal compliance and identify cases requiring further investigation. Assigned to a specialized team for high-risk case adjudications, resolving 400+ D-Major/C-Substantial Issues cases identified by the DoC Inspector General for urgent resolution.
Partnership Specialist
New Americans Initiative, YMCA of Greater NY | New York, NY | January 2017 - March 2019
DOJ-accredited legal counselor; guided clients through immigration benefits processes, including Naturalization, DACA, TPS, and Removal Proceedings. Orchestrated a 2-day Naturalization Fair with NY-09 Congresswoman Yvette Clarke’s office, processing 250+ naturalization applications, meeting annual goals, and assisting partner organizations with surplus client referrals.
Technical Projects
Building a Party Support Model & 2022 Midterm Voting Behavior
Employed the 2021 American Community Survey (demographic, housing, economic, and social profiles) to create 450 unique features for predicting Partisan Voter Index (PVI) scores across all 435 U.S. congressional districts. RidgeCV model correctly predicted PVI scores of post-redistricting U.S. congressional districts with within 4.3 percentage points of true PVI. Created interactive dashboard to present insights on PVI score, 2022 electoral margin, U.S. Representative info, and visualizations for top predictive features.
NLP Analysis of Messaging for 2022 Democratic Candidates
Used unsupervised learning to analyze the campaign tweets of Reps. Chris Deluzio and Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, two Democratic candidates who significantly overperformed in Republican-leaning districts. Applied Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) on GloVe-embedded Twitter data to uncover distinct messaging themes, highlighting differences in strategies around union solidarity, reproductive rights, and anti-extremism.
Education & Training
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | B.A., Chemistry and Political Science |
| Flatiron School, New York | Data Science Bootcamp |
| Arena Academy, Atlanta | Data Track |
| DOJ Accreditation through CUNY Law, Queens | Immigration Law |
| OPM Suitability and Fitness Adjudications, Slippery Rock | Professional Certification |