Gary M. Segura,PhD
Founding Partner & President
Gary is Founding Partner and President of BSP Research. Over the past 25 years, he has directed polling research that has completed hundreds of thousands of interviews of Americans of all backgrounds on matters of political importance. Gary was a principal investigator for both the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies and the 2006 Latino National Survey. Gary was formerly the co-founder of the research firm Latino Decisions, which he left at the end of December 2020.
He has briefed members of both the House and Senate as well as senior Obama and Biden White House officials and appeared on National Public Radio, the “News Hour,” “Frontline,” “the CBS Evening News,” MSNBC, and numerous other outlets.
Gary previously directed Latino polling and focus group research for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and his research was credited with informing critical Latino mobilization efforts in 2020. He also oversaw numerous state and national polls for Univision News that had statewide samples of the full electorate with Latino oversamples.
Gary has also directed Latino polling for U.S. Senate races in Colorado for Senator Bennet and twice in Nevada, part of the teams that elected Catherine Cortez-Masto in 2016 and Jackie Rosen in 2018. In 2022, he worked with an IE in Nevada to mobilize Latinos in support of progressive candidates. He has led polling for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ BOLD PAC, in successfully electing new Latina/o candidates to Congress.
Gary also has experience in local politics, leading mayoral polling recently in Chicago and Los Angeles that informed get-out-the-vote campaigns in Black and Brown communities.
Beyond direct electoral campaigns, Gary has also led polling and messaging campaigns for climate and environmental clients focused on understanding and influencing public opinion in support of issues such as water conservation, natural resource conservation, and climate change.
Gary also supports academic and scholarly research projects that often involve complex sampling, experimental methods and statistical analysis.
Segura also has extensive expertise on LGBT issues. He served as an expert witness on the nature of political power in all three of landmark LGBT marriage rights cases in 2013 and 2015, Windsor v. United States, Hollingsworth v Perry, and the historic Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized marriage equality as a constitutionally protected right. He has provided expert testimony on discrimination in both voting rights cases and LGBT civil rights cases, and filed amicus curiae briefs on subjects ranging from marriage equality and affirmative action.
Gary holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and from 2017 thru 2022 was the Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He holds faculty appointments in Public Policy, Chicana/o Studies and Political Science. In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.