Building bridges across the aisle is all in a day’s work for a Senate policy advisor.
This story was written by Ian Jones as part of the McCourt School’s annual alumni magazine, Policy Perspectives.
As a freshman biomedical sciences undergraduate at Marquette University in 2016, Kaitlin Johnstone (MPP’24) was not especially focused on politics, outside of voting in the contentious presidential election. But she noticed a pronounced shift on campus after the results came in.
A political science class sparked her interest and led, two years later, to a legislative internship in Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s office. This experience launched a career that has seen Johnstone rise from staff assistant to senior policy advisor, working for several Midwestern senators over the past six years.
Since January 2025, she has served as senior policy advisor for Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin. It’s a position she sought out in part because Baldwin serves the state where she earned her undergraduate degree, but also because of the policies the senator supports.
“I really enjoy working for a Midwest member because I lived in these places. Sen. Baldwin really cares about Wisconsin and really knows her state,” Johnstone said. “She is very responsive; she is someone who likes to talk to people and get a good sense of her constituents and what they care about at different moments.”
Getting to work on issues ranging from transportation and housing to tax and tribal issues also motivates Johnstone. “Public policy is important because it drives everything. It is very broad, but that’s a good thing. It touches literally everything, even if people don’t notice it or think about it.”
Baldwin’s commitment to committee work — from appropriations to commerce to health — was another incentive for Johnstone. “Every single committee she works on, I have some sort of supporting role in her work there,” she said. “When I got to be more senior on the Hill, going from legislative correspondent to legislative aide to legislative assistant to senior policy advisor, I sought out someone who was very active in the committees that they were assigned to and that I could help with that committee work.”
Supporting the senator in meetings, hearings and legislative markups is “a cool situation where I get to have face time with her,” she said. “And this portfolio is an exciting one.”
As senior policy advisor, Johnstone might be writing a letter in response to an executive branch action one day and drafting legislation the next. She gives the senator recommendations on signing onto or co-sponsoring legislation and interacts with a wide array of staffers and others on Capitol Hill to build support for bills or letters Baldwin’s office is developing.
“Every day is different,” she said. While Sen. Baldwin is a Democrat, “she works quite a bit across the aisle. I do have a lot of conversations with different Republican offices on things I think their boss may be interested in working on. There’s a lot of relationship-building, I meet with a lot of constituents and stakeholders who come in.”
As for the future, this self-professed “legislative nerd” is likely to be found researching and strategizing on how to advance transportation, housing and other policy programs for some time to come, regardless of the changing tides of Congress.
“I think that there’s an understanding at the legislative level that there are still opportunities to push bipartisan work forward. Even if we’re in the minority on the federal level, there’s a lot to be done in the public sector,” Johnstone said.
Her experience at McCourt continues to inform her career, equipping her with both a quantitative foundation and lasting insights from professors whose expertise is grounded in their own experiences. “I found that to be really helpful because they can lean on their work and their backgrounds,” she said. “You’re learning from the best of the best in DC.”