Career
Bluestein was born in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated from North Springs High School and the University of Georgia (political science and journalism), where he was editor of The Red & Black campus newspaper. [3]
Bluestein spent seven years with the Associated Press, between 2005 and 2012, where he covered breaking news, politics and legal affairs. He reported on the execution of Troy Davis, [4] the post-presidency of Jimmy Carter [5] and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, [6] the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion [7] and the major tornado outbreak of 2011 in Alabama and Georgia. [8]
He joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2012 to write about the political trends that shaped the region. [9] He covered the 2014 race for governor between Nathan Deal and Jason Carter and the 2016 [10] and 2020 [11] presidential elections. He has examined how Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020 [12] and documented the political ascent of Stacey Abrams, [13] Brian Kemp, [14] Jon Ossoff, [15] Raphael Warnock [16] and David Perdue. [17]
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Bluestein contributed to a series of articles examining political change in the "Shifting South." [18] He also has reported Georgia-related news from the Panama Canal Zone [19] and Israel. [20]
Bluestein was called Georgia's "chief political reporter" in an article in Atlanta Magazine [21] and the state's "ace" politics journalist by Chris Cillizza. [22]
He was named to UGA's 40 Under 40 Honorees in 2021. He delivered the convocation address at UGA's Grady College in 2021. [23] Axios called him the "most dedicated" [24] Georgia fan at the 2023 college football national championship when he attended the Los Angeles game shortly after being hospitalized in San Diego with a kidney stone.
On stage at a Donald Trump rally in 2022, he was called "Buttstein" by former State Representative Vernon Jones. [25]
He is an MSNBC and NBC News political contributor [26] and author of Flipped, published in 2022, [27] on Georgia's transformation into a swing state. He has won numerous awards, including a 2021 Toner Prize for Local Political Reporting for a project on the campaign to undermine Georgia's 2020 election [28] and won first-place for political reporting in the South in 2024 and 2025 by the Society for Professional Journalists. [29]
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