Ashley Parker named senior national political correspondent for The Washington Post

Ashley will play a leading role in chronicling the forces that are upending the political parties and shaping the direction of the country. She will be at the forefront of our coverage of this fall’s midterm elections and the 2024 presidential campaign, and will tell compelling stories about the nation’s culture, people and divides.

In this position, Ashley will build on her award-winning work covering the White House. Since January 2021, she has served as White House bureau chief, leading The Post’s reporting on the Biden presidency. Before that, she covered all four years of the Trump administration as a White House reporter. Ashley is known for her distinctive voice, her wry humor and the fearlessness that she brings to her coverage, as well as her collegiality and spirited leadership. Her definitive pieces take readers inside major events, such as the Biden administration’s handling of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the White House’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s decades-long effort to block gun control and President Donald Trump’s handling of his coronavirus infection.

In 2022, Ashley was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Robin Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting for coverage of the causes, costs and aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. She was also part of The Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and a George Polk Award in 2018 for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Ashley also received, together with Philip Rucker, the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for distinguished reporting on the presidency in 2017.

Ashley has been a prominent representative of The Post on television and radio and in other public appearances. In 2019, she co-moderated The Post and MSNBC’s Democratic presidential primary debate in Atlanta. For the past several years, she has been a senior political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

Ashley joined The Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she started as a research assistant to columnist Maureen Dowd and covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns, as well as Congress, among other topics. She has also written for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Glamour and the Washingtonian, along with other publications.

Ashley graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, where she served as an editor for the Daily Pennsylvanian. She lives in Washington with her husband, Mike Bender, a political correspondent for the New York Times, and their two daughters.

Please join us in congratulating her on her new role, which she will move into later this summer.