Tom Carsey, age 52, of Durham, NC, died on February 21, 2018, after a stubbornly determined fight with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He was born on January 20, 1966, in Omaha, NE, to Dennis and Marsha (Green) Carsey. He graduated from Fremont (NE) High School in 1984.
Tom graduated from Wayne State College (NE) in 1989, where at age 19 he met his best friend and the love of his life Dawn (Warren) Carsey. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. From there, he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1995-2000, Florida State University from 2000-2006, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill from 2006-2018. In addition to being a political science professor at UNC, he served as the director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science from 2011-2017 — this was a role he cared about immensely.
Tom was a prolific researcher, publishing three books and over 30 journal articles, including articles in all the top journals in political science. He made major contributions to our understanding of numerous aspects of the American political process — state legislative and gubernatorial elections, long-term changes in party politics, legislative politics and policy-making, and the role of race in U.S. voting behavior — and his work also contributed to implementing simulation methods in political science teaching and research.