On Friday the 13th, we offer 13 post-election insights from five members of the politics department about what’s happening now and what challenges facing Joe Biden (and there are boatloads) if and when he’s able to assume the U.S. presidency.

Indeed, President Trump’s ongoing refusal to concede or even acknowledge a potential transition threatens “even a most minimalist definition of democracy,” says Professor of Politics Stephen Engel.

As president, Biden may find it difficult to effect even basic policy changes, like reversing Trump’s restrictive approach to immigration, adds Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz.

Joining Engel and Pérez-Armendáriz for a were politics department colleagues John Baughman, Alyssa Maraj Grahame, and Jim Richter.

1. Lawsuits have failed and will continue to fail

Lawsuits challenging the results of the presidential election “have been failing and will continue to fail,” say Baughman, an associate professor whose focus is on U.S. politics, including Congress, elections, political parties, and political participation.

2. The challenge to the election is based on ‘a grift and a con’

By challenging the election, Baughman suggests that Trump and his followers are engaged in “a grift and a con.”

The grift: The Trump administration is using their fight against the results to .

The con is of Trump’s base, “turning their disappointment into anger that can be used to mobilize for the Senate special elections in Georgia and to mobilize toward the next rounds of federal elections in 2022 and 2024.”

3. Challenging the results of elections is a ‘dangerous game’

Anyone who played schoolyard games as a kid knows that once the rules aren’t followed, the game disintegrates. And that’s what can happen if Trump continues his shenanigans, says Baughman.

Challenging the election and refusing to concede is a “dangerous game, not in terms of the current election but how it threatens confidence in our democratic and electoral institutions. This is where the lasting harm is likely to come — erosion in the electoral processes, fueling dismissal of President Biden as the rightfully elected president. And once we lose that kind of faith in political institutions it’s going to take a lot of work to get it back.” 

Further, calling into question election results also threatens to “dismiss political institutions broadly as a legitimate venue for resolving disputes. And that confidence is not something that comes back very easily, either, because it becomes very easy to blame the institution or the process for any disappointing outcome.”

And if confidence in electoral institutions erodes, “that would also have downstream effects for bipartisan efforts within Congress, if members of either party do not think that they can legitimately pursue their plans with the other party.”

4. Trump’s restrictive approach to immigration will be hard to undo.

In recent history, presidential administrations typically approached immigration from the perspective of reform, says Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, an associate professor whose focus includes Latinx politics, Latin American politics, and immigration politics and policy.

“Reform was the starting line, the goal being to create a path toward citizenship for the undocumented,” she says. 

However, the Trump administration’s approach has been to “ramp up immigration restrictions across the board, including restrictions on refugee resettlement; asylum seekers; immigrant and nonimmigrant visas; citizenship applications; and the path toward citizenship for undocumented citizens.”

For example, on average in the decade before Trump, we saw about 98,000 refugees resettled per year. Under the Trump administration, the average has been 15,000. “And we’ve seen a 50 percent drop in legal migration between 2016 and 2019 due to policies like , major new , and restrictions on students.” 

While Biden can take executive action on some immigration issues, like , stopping family separation, and restoring , “the Biden administration will have its hands full just getting us to where we were before Trump.”

Pérez-Armendáriz notes that some say the “single most important thing Biden can do is to appoint someone to the Department of Homeland Security who restores the value and belief that we’re a country of immigrants.

“But that actually might be harder than people expect. It’s very sad for me to even hear myself say that this is what we’re aiming for.” 

5. Turning the “Abolish ICE” discourse into policy will be a challenge for the Democrats

At some point, the discourse around abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will run headlong into centrist, across-the-aisle policy efforts. 

“Biden can take steps to make ICE more accountable, but there will be people for whom even the prospect of another Trump, Donald Trump Jr., in the next election, won’t make them willing to take a middle ground and give up their goal to abolish ICE,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. 

6. We can agree (can’t we?) on one thing: Trump’s foreign policy was a….

“I’m in one of those rare positions where I can say something like, ‘Trump’s foreign policy is a disaster,’ and it will not be a partisan issue,” says Richter, a professor who teaches international relations, environmental politics, public memory, and the politics of Eastern Europe and Russia.

Richter points to the boatload of elected and appointed Republican leaders with foreign-policy cred who have gone public with . “So let me say it: ‘Trump’s foreign policy was a disaster,’” says Richter.

Since the Great Depression, the U.S. approach to foreign policy has been to help strengthen overseas industrial economies to the extent it could, counting on them as trading partners to safeguard the U.S. economy against another Depression and threats to its democracy.

“What the Trump administration has done is to decrease other countries’ trust in the U.S. to do the right thing under any circumstances.”

“People disagree on how wonderful our approach has been for everybody, but for the industrialized world it has worked pretty well, and it has been the consensus of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment since 1945. It’s a good one and it protects U.S. interests.” The approach also includes mutual protection agreements through NATO and with Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

In four years, says Richter, “Trump has really destroyed a lot of that — or at least diminished it. I was in the Czech Republic last year, and you can see fears. If you go to Germany, the fears are even greater.

“What the Trump administration has done is to decrease other countries’ trust that U.S. institutions work and decrease trust in the U.S. to do the right thing under any circumstances.”

Clearly, says Richter, Biden would want to recreate that decades-long foreign-policy consensus, and he can do some things, like restore funding to the World Health Organization and rejoin the Paris Agreement. “That should not be a problem. But restoring the trust he can’t do.”

As Richter’s colleagues point out, achieving other goals, such as rebuilding the state department or rebuilding the intelligence community, “will be difficult and take a long time, due to the political realities.

“Just to get back to where the U.S. was will take a long time. And the U.S. will always be in a weaker position than it once was — because it’s harder to rebuild something than to tear it down.”

7. The U.S. is not in a position to be a leader in combating climate change

Richter says that “we are not in a position to lead like we were in the 1990s, when the U.S. represented 25 percent or more of greenhouse-gas emissions. .”

China is growing fast and India wants to grow fast. In India, coal is the most easily accessible and cheapest form of energy for development. “It’s there, it’s cheap to get at, and they’re going to use it.”

“The U.S.’s fate in terms of climate change is not in U.S. hands. It belongs in the hands of people in Beijing, in New Delhi, in Brasilia, as well as the U.S. and Brussels and places like that.

“The United States can’t force those countries; we’ll have to try to negotiate and that’s going to cost a lot of money, which I think will be very difficult to do politically and nearly impossible given Trump America-first ideas.”

8. For Democrats, the election is a reprieve, not a victory

“A lot of Democrats were hoping this election would be like the 1932 landslide,” a repudiation of the Republican Party that saw Franklin Roosevelt win 42 of 48 states,” says Alyssa Maraj Grahame, a visiting assistant professor who focuses on political economy, work, crisis politics and the financial sector. 

“But it’’s become quite clear that it’s nothing close to that. Democrats should see the outcome of this election, at least as we currently understand it, as a reprieve, not a victory.”

9. The parties need to rethink how they talk to voters about the economy

Typically, economic policy debates assume that Americans’ preferences fall along a “traditional left-right ideological access, and that most Americans are pretty close to the middle,” says Grahame. “The parties then compete for those voters and pull them one way or another. 

But based on 2020 election results, Grahame sees a “disconnect between the parties’ economic platforms and what American voters seem to actually want, and how they vote when these kinds of questions show up on ballot initiatives.” 

The big example is in Florida, where voters approved amending the state constitution to . Approval had a high bar: 60 percent had to say yes, and 60.8 percent did.

But Trump also won Florida by 3 percent. “A minimum wage increase is not on the Republican agenda, and the Miami-Dade Republican Party officially opposed that amendment proposal,” says Grahame. “So, why would Florida vote to increase its minimum wage to $15 and also vote for Trump?”

For now, it’s too soon to answer the question, “but I think we can say that probably at least 10 percent of the Florida electorate said ‘yes’ on Amendment 2 while also voting for Trump.”

For a clue about why Florida voters might vote Trump and the minimum wage increase, Grahame says to look at the country’s growing economic inequality, which has increased “since the 2008 financial crisis to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. We know that this sort of degree of inequality is politically destabilizing, and that’s something to watch out for.”

In an unstable environment, “Trump has been really quite adept at mobilizing anger and resentment, especially in rural areas that are experiencing economic decline,” Grahame says. “He’s also really good at getting people to identify the deprivation they’re experiencing with Republican Party’s responses.” 

10. The Biden-Harris ticket didn’t effectively speak to rural consciousness

Biden was probably among the best-suited Democratic candidates to speak to rural voters. But his running mate, Kamala Harris? “Not so much,” says Grahame. “She’s very much like a coastal elite. That was also a major shortcoming of the Democrats’ 2016 ticket, which basically comprised two coastal elites.”

Voters in coal-mining areas who were worried about losing their jobs have been more receptive to responses from Trump than from Democrats.

In terms of Democrats’ failure to communicate with rural Americans, “maybe it’s not so much messaging but packaging,” Grahame says. “Maybe they lack concreteness in what proposals mean for people, say, in coal-producing regions.”

For example, Grahame suggests that voters in coal-mining areas who were worried about losing their jobs have been more receptive to responses from Trump than from Democrats, even if .

But when one looks at Democratic policies from the perspective of a coal worker, “it’s not really clear what the transition [away from coal] means for people in those places,” she says.

“This pandemic and economic downturn has made the question of an unimaginable future much more real for a much wider swath of Americans. Until Democrats can answer their questions in a in rural parts of the country.”

11. The current post-election path might prove an existential threat to U.S. democracy

Engel, who focuses on constitutional law, U.S. political and democratic development, and LGBTQ politics, teed up a question from a fellow scholar and friend, Tom Pepinsky, a comparative politics specialist at Cornell who focuses on democratic decline in Southeast Asian politics. 

, “Have political scientists been too pessimistic” about U.S. politics and democratic institutions? Are they, in fact, more resilient, and is the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris proof of that resiliency? For Pepinsky, the question was rhetorical: Yes, he says, “but we still do not have a good way to know how strong America’s political institutions are.”

Before giving his own answer to the question, Engel said that “we need to define what we mean by democracy.” And he gave a very simple definition of “what is sometimes called ‘procedural’ or ‘minimalist’ democracy: a system that has a non-violent procedure, usually in an election, by which a government is formed and is perceived by the public as legitimate and on that basis passes law.”

So, how did the U.S. fare in terms of that definition? Noting that some �ֲ���ý colleagues have called him “Eeyore” because he is not “dispositionally an optimist,” Engel started with what looks good.

“We just went through a successful election, and in the midst of a public health crisis, more people voted than ever before. And the litigation that is being brought forward is not considered serious. This achievement is not something to downplay.”

Still…

“I think the Trump administration’s current refusal to concede the election is a threat to democratic sustainability precisely because this refusal undermines even a most minimalist definition of democracy,” said Engel.

“I worry that we waver on the precipice of a very serious problem. President Trump’s refusal to concede has diminished the capacity of resources to go to the transition and the time needed for transition.

“I think the Trump administration is doing exactly what Steve Bannon told them to do: ‘’ to confuse everyone.”

“We’ve seen a roiling in the Department of Defense. Lindsey Graham . And some have noted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo behaved in a way I could only call unprofessional — or perhaps just too cute — by insisting that ‘.’

“All these actions contribute to the development of an idea that somehow the election was illegitimate, despite all evidence to the contrary. This contributes to tearing down the most basic, minimalist, proceduralist definition of a functional democracy: namely that we’ve gone through a successful nonviolent process that has yielded a legitimate outcome that we can trust.”

Engel doesn’t believe those are “substantive threats,” and does believe that “come Jan. 20 Biden will be inaugurated — I don’t think that there’s going to be a slow-motion coup.”

Still….

“I think the Trump administration is doing exactly what Steve Bannon told them to do five years ago, which is in Bannon’s words, ‘’ to confuse everyone. And I think that’s essentially what’s going on now.”

12. The decades-long conservative trend of the federal courts is now a major challenge to Biden

“Mainstream liberals in the Democratic Party, as well as progressives, face serious obstacles, in particular in the federal judiciary,” Engel says. “The Supreme Court, as we know, has six legal conservatives on it now.” 

The conservative legal movement, “a movement across academia, the judiciary itself, the nonprofit, and the interest-group sector, has partnered with what we could call the Christian legal movement to, over the course of the past 40 years, slowly and steadily achieve their goals.” 

“The lower federal judiciary has been successfully filled with more conservatives and, I would say, frankly unqualified jurists in the past four years than under any other presidency. The Senate, if the Republican majority holds, will likely engage in the same obstruction of judicial appointment evident during the Obama administration and, to a lesser degree, during the George W. Bush administration.”

13. The judiciary is “wildly out of step” with public understanding on a range of issues

“The current federal judiciary embraces views of the constitution that are wildly out step with public understanding on a range of issues, spanning abortion access, non-discrimination, environmental regulation, and campaign finance,” says Engel. 

“And so while I expect, for example, the affordable-care act will be upheld, I think that the consideration of race as a variable in higher-ed admissions will most likely be considered unconstitutional, thereby upending 50 years of precedent.

“I believe that same-sex marriage will likely hold, mostly because it’s premised on an idea of dignity that can be easily turned to conservative legal ends, but it and other non-discrimination principles will be curved through what I think to be an overzealous reading of First Amendment religious freedoms.

In sum, says Engel, “I think most problematically the court is entering a precarious position. I think if it’s not careful, it might experience similar levels of popular backlash and sort of core questions about its own institutional legitimacy in the coming years, questions that it faced and it failed to deal with in the 1920s and the 1930s.”

Before their duel in The Princess Bride, the Man in Black says to Inigo Montoya, “Get used to disappointment.”

It would’ve been an apt forewarning to Democrats on election night.

Though many pundits predicted a blue-wave election for Democrats — gaining the presidency, more seats in the House, and perhaps a Senate majority — that turned out to be wishcasting. “It was a status quo election,” says Associate Professor of Politics John Baughman. “In a strange way, this actually looks a lot like 2016: Very little has really changed.”

In fact, he adds, “I think 2020 has revealed who we are as a country. It was not a dramatic, widespread repudiation of Trumpism. And if voters did shift away from Trump, it was not against the Republican Party but against Trump personally as president.”

If Biden wins the presidency — and, of course, depending on the outcome of the Georgia run-off elections — “he will likely have to govern with a Republican-controlled Senate,” Baughman added. “We’re going to have at least two years, and possibly four years or even more, of divided government. And it means that the optimistic goals of Democrats on the public policy front will have to be scaled way back.”

On Wednesday, Baughman offered insights into the election along with politics department colleagues Stephen Engel, Alyssa Maraj Grahame, Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz as well as Stephanie Kelley-Romano of rhetoric, film, and screen studies. Their Zoom presentation was attended by well over 100 viewers.

It’s time to accept that voter behavior is not monolythic

Once again, the two major parties, especially Democrats, need to be reminded not to take for granted the voting habits of any group, said Grahame, a visiting professor of politics who made her point by sharing a conversation she had with a childhood friend on Election Day.

Her friend’s parents, Chinese immigrants, had voted for Obama and Clinton in prior presidential elections. This time, they and other Chinese American friends voted for Trump. “As immigrants, they would be targets of Trump’s particular brand of xenophobia,” said Grahame.

It’s the job of social scientists, she says, to ask questions like, “Under what conditions would it make sense for my friend’s parents to vote for Trump? From their perspective, how does Trump fit into their worldview?”

Turns out, her friend’s parents liked what they perceived as Trump’s tough-on-China attitude, feeling that Obama had allowed China to walk all over the U.S. “There are a lot of parallels between my friend’s struggles to understand her parents’ choice, and our collective struggle to make sense of the election.”

The message: “We shouldn’t be surprised to find out that voter demographics aren’t monoliths,” said Grahame. “There’s no voter demographic for whom either candidate enjoys exclusive support — and that would actually be troubling for democracy if that were the case.”

Pay attention to what the news is saying

As rhetoric from both campaigns ramps up in the post-election days, “it’s really important to pay attention to what the news outlets are saying, as opposed to what the spokespeople for the campaign’s are saying,” says Kelley-Romano, an associate professor of rhetoric, film, screen studies.

“Stick with the information that we have, because there’s going to be a lot of noise out there. I think the media is doing a good job at keeping that noise to a minimum.”

Pay attention to the difference between fanciful narratives and the rule of law

As we follow , it’s important to distinguish between partisan narratives (not to mention baseless conspiracy theories) and the rule of law.

Thus far, Trump’s attempt to say that some mail-in ballots are illegal or invalid “is a narrative framing,” says Engel. “There is literally no constitutional evidence for that claim, so I am skeptical of the lawsuits that are being brought thus far.”

At this point, Baughman believes Trump’s lawsuits declaring voter fraud are “unlikely to find success.” One reason is that the courts don’t want to toss the baby out with the bath water.

“In trying to possibly throw out bad ballots, they don’t want to throw out a lot of good ballots with the bad,” he says.

“There has to be some way for them to distinguish between the ballots that followed a correct process and those few that didn’t. In most cases that’s going to be impossible to do. They’ll be reluctant to throw everything out because that essentially throws out the integrity of the election.”

Election conspiracy theory may not gain traction (but will that matter?)

Though conspiracy theories abound, often pushed out by Trump himself, Kelley-Romano says the fact that Democrats didn’t do all that well in congressional elections might prevent conspiracy theory from gaining traction.

Indeed, says Baughman, in order for other Republican leaders to take on Trump’s call about election fraud means that those leaders would be undermining results in their own states, in some cases undermining elections they themselves ran.

So, says Kelley-Romano, “there are contradictions that will do a disservice to conspiracy theorists — but I never underestimate them. Trump will make a lot of noise — but already on Twitter, and even Fox News, there is a distancing from his rhetoric.”

Still, adds Engel, Trump’s baseless conspiracy attempts could affect a Biden presidency through “the political and rhetorical process of de-legitimizing. It is analogous but importantly distinct from Trump’s birtherism during the Obama presidency: Cast a cloud over Biden from the start in order to keep the Republican base aggrieved and motivated for 2022 and 2024.”

Our elected leaders should heed our own State Department

Hours after Trump falsely declared victory, the U.S. State Department issued a statement about the recent election in Côte d’Ivoire. It said, in part, “the U.S. calls on Côte d’Ivoire leaders to show commitment to the democratic process and the rule of law.”

“So there you go,” said Baughman. “Our own state department.”

We want clarity. Be prepared to be disappointed

Among Democrats, “there was great desire for this election to be an unambiguous repudiation of Trump’s America,” said Grahame. “But it’s almost definitely not going to be that. Our desire for clarity is its own critical failure. We all have to grapple with the fact that over 40 percent of American voters have said ‘yes’ to Trump’s America.”

“The dominant discourse about Trump — his racism and his authoritarianism — leaves us flummoxed about his apparent increased support, including among some non-white voters in certain areas. And we bemoan the extent of division in the United States.”

Rather than trying to dismiss or explain away the contradictions — by blaming low-information voters, wondering about swing voters, or saying that some voters can’t see what’s truly in their best interest — we should “instead confront the underlying systemic causes of such immense polarization.”

There are interesting outcomes everywhere.

Engel, a professor of politics, said much can be learned by looking at results outside the spotlight races. “There are some interesting outcomes, even if it’s a status quo election, even if there’s a lot of ambiguities.”

In Oregon, possessing small amounts of heroin or cocaine is now legal. Oregon also joined the District of Columbia in decriminalizing psychedelic mushrooms. And in New Jersey, Arizona, South Dakota, and Montana recreational marijuana use is now legal. Nearly a .

Engel said that “those are interesting outcomes from the perspective of legal nullification” — the legal theory that a state has the right to invalidate federal laws — “whereby the states are just ignoring federal criminal law with regard to drug possession and drug use.”

Also, in Colorado, a proposed measure that would eliminate abortion access after 22 weeks failed.

In terms of descriptive representation among newly elected officials, the election saw:

• In New York, Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones in the two houses of Congress. (Torres identifies as both Black and Latino, and will also be the first openly gay Latino member of Congress.)
  
• Cori Bush become the first Black woman elected to the House from the state of Missouri.

• The entire House delegation for the state of New Mexico be women of color.

• The number of Republican women voted to the House in this election be the most ever.

• Sarah McBride become the first trans woman elected to a state senate, in Delaware, making her the highest ranking openly transgender official in the country.

• At age 25, Madison Cawthorne, from North Caroline, become the youngest Republican ever to be elected to the House he is 25. (He’s the first person born in the 1990s elected to Congress.)

Some likely voters may not be playing ball with pollsters

While polls were criticized after 2016 due to failures to predict key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, they still do a very good job, says Baugham. Again this year, the national polls seemed to be pretty much on target, “though we can’t really yet say whether the polling was off at the state level.”

But there might be an emerging systemic problem with polling, in how some likely voters might be refusing to play ball with pollsters.

“It’s a genuine concern, about voters who distrust the media and distrust pollsters. And if those distrustful voters are more likely to be Trump voters than not, then it would mean that we’re undercounting them.”

“But I’m not convinced that we need to dump on the pollsters just yet because I think by the time we get to the end of the count, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being pretty close to what they were projecting.”

Voting in Maine still reflects that ‘politics is local’

Maine voters criss-crossed party lines during the 2020 election, defying the trend in other states, where races are guided by the highly partisan national political landscape. “State and even local races are increasingly reactions to the national parties,” Baughman said.

Maine has been mostly immune to that trend, where, to paraphrase the, politics is still local, and less along strict party lines. “There seems to have been a much higher rate of old traditional split-ticket voting in Maine than then we’ve seen in other states,” said Baughman

For example, Democratic Rep. Jared Golden ’11 probably got support from Trump voters to win his second term representing the state’s rural 2nd District in Congress. Viewed as very vulnerable, incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins probably to support from Biden voters to retain her seat.

The Republican Party is expanding its base

“Trump seems to have increased support among a number of demographics, including non-white men, in certain places,” says Grahame. “It’s interesting because it’s not particularly consistent with the Republican Party’s approach to elections. He seems to have expanded his support from some demographics almost despite himself.”

In Florida and Texas, there’s strong evidence that .

Which is no surprise to Baughman, who says there were warning signs that the Biden campaign “had not done enough, with the right kind of outreach, to Latinx voters in various states, while Trump was investing in such efforts,” in south Florida, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and other places.

Democrats didn’t quite believe that Trump could be successful with Latinx voters. “There was a degree of complacency,” said Baughman. “Because of the politics — around the border, immigration, and other factors —  Democrats sort of took for granted that Latinx voters are going to oppose Trump. That was clearly a mistake.”

Some voters’ ‘political socialization’ is still ongoing

The process of how we develop our political habits and perspectives is called “political socialization.” Some Americans, such as immigrants, develop their political socialization differently than other citizens, explains Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, an associate professor of politics.

For example, research shows that for Latinx voters, political socialization is not handed down by older family members, so they don’t have the “my grandfather was a Republican so I’m a Republican” experience.

Instead, their socialization can be active and ongoing, occurring “through their American experience,” says Pérez-Armendáriz. And since their American experience is ongoing, their voting habits can also be more fluid.

“While some issues that Latinx voters care about will align with the Democratic party, they can be persuaded to be on one side or the other more than other voters might be.”

In some states, there may have been a COVID backlash

Though some states’ aggressive pandemic policies, such Maine’s, have saved lives, some citizens in those states may have nevertheless voted for Trump as a protest against shutdown measures. “Shutdowns have been effective,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “But that doesn’t mean they haven’t been extremely harmful to people in ways that affect how they vote.”

For example, some voters were disproportionately affected by shutdowns — not because they had to keep working in essential jobs that might be dangerous but because they could not work. “I never heard any Latinx laborers, for example, say, ‘What I would prefer is to not have work.’”

Pérez-Armendáriz says such protested voting may have occurred elsewhere, mentioning rural Maine, where during the spring and summer one saw many signs on vehicles and front yards with vulgarities directed at Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, clear if blunt responses to the state shutdown.

COVID may have helped Republican campaigning

“There’s a strong belief in campaigns that on the ground, face-to-face interaction is incredibly important,” says Grahame.

Yet, for reasons related to the pandemic, the Democrats scaled back their on-the-ground canvassing, while Republicans still pursued in-person campaigning and in-person rallies, including in South Florida, leaving “Democrats to work overtime to try to figure out ways to substitute for that.” Digital and social-media efforts can help, but they’re not a substitute.

Going forward, “which campaign did a better job getting out the vote during a pandemic will be one of the really important areas of study,” says Baughman.

It may not be ‘the economy, stupid’ anymore

In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign hammered away at President Bush by pointing out the national recession. “It’s the economy, stupid,” was strategist James Carville’s comment, meant to highlight the the need to stay on message.

“The idea was that the average voter would look at their own experience in the economy, give credit or blame to the parties, and vote accordingly,” said Baughman. “But as our party affiliations have become more calcified, we become more impervious to changes in the economy.

“As a discipline, political science needs to reassess how we think of economic factors, at least in the context of American elections in the face of this kind of high party polarization.”