Club Breakfast: U.S. Politics Following the Midterm Elections

Join us for a breakfast panel on Dec. 4 with experts from both sides of the aisle, all with U.S. Government experience, distilling the fallout from the U.S. Midterm elections on Nov. 6. We’ll look at the lessons from the election, in which Democrats handily won the House of Representatives, flipping many seats from Republicans yet where Republicans retained control of the U.S. Senate. What does this mean for U.S. Policy in the next two years? Will divided government mean stalled government? Will Democrats find a way to work with President Donald Trump or spend most of their time investigating him? And what does this all portend for 2020 and the next presidential race?

Stephen Olson is a Research Fellow at the Hinrich Foundation. He began his career in Washington as an international trade negotiator, and served on the U.S. negotiating team for the NAFTA negotiations. He subsequently became President of the Hong Kong-based Pacific Basin Economic Council, and Vice Chairman of Cairo-based ARTOC Group for Investment and Development. Currently, he is also a Visiting Scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Nancy Hernreich Bowen is a Senior Advisor at Teneo. She has assisted clients with Asia and U.S. trade strategy, relationship-building, issues and crisis management and public relations. Prior to joining Teneo, Nancy was a senior adviser for McLarty Associates and managing director of NHB International, a Hong Kong-based consulting firm which she founded in 2001. She was a Managing Director of the Clinton Global Initiative Asia and assistant to the President and Director of Oval Office operations from 1993-2001.

Frank Lavin is CEO and founder of Export Now, which helps companies sell on-line in China from their home offices. In government, Lavin served as Under Secretary for International Trade at the U.S. Department of Commerce from 2005 to 2007. In that capacity, Lavin served as lead U.S. trade negotiator for both China and India and was the senior policy official in the Commerce Department responsible for commercial policy, export promotion, and trade negotiations across the globe. He was U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Singapore from 2001-05, where his duties included helping negotiate the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement.