Background and career
Mark Evan Halperin (born January 11, 1965) is an American journalist, political commentator, author, and founder of the interactive media platform 2WAY. He previously was political director for ABC News, where he also edited the Washington, D.C., newsletter The Note. In 2010, Halperin joined MSNBC as a senior political analyst and contributor. Alongside John Heilemann, he co-managed Bloomberg Politics, co-hosted With All Due Respect, and co-authored the bestselling books Game Change and Double Down: Game Change 2012. Halperin also co-produced and appeared with Heilemann and Mark McKinnon in Showtime's The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth, covering the 2016 United States Presidential Election. In 2017, Halperin was accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct during his time at ABC News, leading to his dismissal from NBC News, Showtime, and other media partnerships. He later returned to broadcasting through independent platforms, launching the digital news network 2WAY, and in 2025 began hosting a program on Megyn Kelly’s MK Media network.
Halperin was born to a Jewish family, the son of Morton Halperin, a foreign policy expert and staff member of the National Security Council during the presidential administration of Richard Nixon where he worked for Henry Kissinger; and Ina Weinstein Halperin Young. He was born in New York City and raised in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1982, before he began his senior year at Walt Whitman High School, he lived with a family in Japan as part of the Youth for Understanding program. He received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1987.
Halperin joined ABC News in 1988. In 1997, he was named the political director for ABC News. In that capacity, Halperin appeared frequently as a correspondent and political analyst for ABC News television and radio programs. He founded and edited The Note, which appeared daily on ABCNews.com. In October 2006, Halperin and John F. Harris, published a book together, The Way to Win: Clinton, Bush, Rove, and How to Take the White House in 2008. Since 2006, Halperin has been a board member of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire. He has been on their public advisory board since it was created in 2008. In March 2007, Halperin became a political analyst for ABC News and was replaced as political director by David Chalian. In May 2007, he was hired as a political analyst and editor at large for Time magazine. In June 2010, he was hired as a senior political analyst at MSNBC. In 2011, Time released an iPad app called "Mark Halperin 2012" that contains material from Halperin's "The Page" as well as video, photos, breaking news, and Halperin's take on the news.
On June 30, 2011, Halperin was suspended from his duties at MSNBC for "slurring" President Barack Obama on the program Morning Joe, after he said of Obama "I thought he was kind of a dick" for his performance at the previous day's press conference. His suspension was lifted a month later. In December 2011, Halperin was listed as number 1 in Salon's 2011 Hack List, his reporting described as "shallow and predictable" as well as "both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race". Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker wrote that Halperin's The Circus is "both an argument for horse-race journalism and a way to see its inner workings, and so to track Heilemann and Halperin in their long traipse across the American interior is to see the media discovering its own vulnerabilities, just as Trump was exploiting them".
According to a May 3, 2019 report in The Daily Beast, Halperin worked on repairing his reputation during the first quarter of 2019 with a goal of returning as a pundit on television and radio. According to the article, Halperin enlisted the help of Michael Smerconish, Mika Brzezinski, and Joe Scarborough on an under-the-radar yet calculated professional rehabilitation campaign. Since the beginning of 2019, Halperin resumed posting on Twitter. Around the same time, Halperin appeared on SiriusXM with Smerconish, where he said he has been working with the Fortune Society, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that provides essential support to the formerly incarcerated. On August 18, 2019, publisher Regan Arts announced that Halperin had signed a new book deal. The book, entitled How to Beat Trump: America's Top Political Strategists on What It Will Take, was published in early-November 2019. Contributors to the book included David Axelrod, Donna Brazile, and James Carville. Both CNN and NBC declined to promote the book. After news broke about his upcoming book, Halperin faced widespread criticism and outrage, with Gretchen Carlson calling the deal "a slap in the face to all women". Rebecca Katz, a political strategist said on Twitter, "you can beat Trump without supporting the career rehabilitation of Mark Halperin." CNN political commentator Karen Finney called Halperin "a predator" and denounced publisher Regan Arts. Eleanor McManus, who had written of being sexually harassed by Halperin as a 21-year-old, commented: "He leveraged his position as a prominent journalist to prey on women... Giving him a book once again puts him in a position of authority and that is a slap in the face to all the women that he has victimized." According to a September 9, 2019 report in The Daily Beast, Halperin allegedly made vague threats toward MSNBC president Phil Griffin during a phone call after Griffin refused to approve a possible collaboration with the Morning Joe team earlier in 2019. In 2019, Halperin launched a daily political blog called "Wide World of News". In 2023, Wide World of News became a paid subscription described as "the inside track on what will happen next and why" in the political arena. In 2020, Halperin began appearing on Newsmax TV, both as a contributor and as the host of its weekly Sunday show, Mark Halperin's Focus Group. The series ended after three seasons.
In 2024, Halperin founded and launched a startup interactive video platform called "2Way", where he currently facilitates daily live video conference calls that attract tens of thousands of viewers. The program is described as a virtual town hall, where a bipartisan panel (usually consisting of Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine) reacts to the real-time opinions of ordinary people speaking on the topics of the day in what is essentially a large zoom call. Halperin moderates. Since May 2026, the permanent co-hosts of the show are Republican Larry O'Connor and Democrat Kevin Walling. Halperin begins most segments by saying the platform seeks to promote "peace, love and understanding", an ethos of listening and learning, and to not "put smack in the chat" despite partisan disagreements. Segments are viewable and archived on 2way.tv, YouTube and X. Halperin was among the first political journalists to predict that President Biden would drop out of the 2024 race.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
