scholarly journals Age Limitations for Presidential Candidates? Exploring Student Perspectives Using Classroom Debates

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 195-196
Author(s):  
Jason Garbarino

Abstract Ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election, Donald Trump (age 73) and his primary opponent, Joseph Biden (age 76) received extensive criticism regarding the aptness of their candidacies based upon their current ages. While the United States Constitution requires candidates to have “attained the age of thirty-five years”, no age cap for presidential candidates exists. In response to timely public discussion, undergraduate interprofessional gerontology students worked in assigned groups to prepare to debate either in favor of, or in opposition to a constitutional amendment capping the age of presidential candidates. Following classroom debates, course faculty moderated in-depth conversation examining cogent arguments made throughout the debates. After attending this session, participants will understand the logistics of planning in-class debates, moderating post-debate student discussions, and evaluation methods of student debate performance and on a corresponding reflective writing assignment. Student and faculty takeaways and prospective classroom debate ideas will be provided.

The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 627-650
Author(s):  
Jamie L. Carson ◽  
Spencer Hardin ◽  
Aaron A. Hitefield

Abstract The 2020 elections brought to an end one of the most divisive and historic campaigns in the modern era. Former Vice President Joe Biden was elected the 46th President of the United States with the largest number of votes ever cast in a presidential election, defeating incumbent President Donald Trump in the process. The record turnout was especially remarkable in light of the ongoing pandemic surrounding COVID-19 and the roughly 236,000 Americans who had died of the virus prior to the election. This article examines the electoral context of the 2020 elections focusing on elections in both the House and Senate. More specifically, this article examines the candidates, electoral conditions, trends, and outcomes in the primaries as well as the general election. In doing so, we provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the climate and outcome of the 2020 congressional elections. Finally, the article closes with a discussion of the broader implications of the election outcomes on both the incoming 117th Congress as well as the upcoming 2022 midterm election.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Barrett-Fox

Religious right leaders and voters in the United States supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election for the same reason that all blocs vote as they do: They believed that the candidate offered them the best opportunity to protect and extend their power and create their preferred government. The puzzle of their support, then, is less why they chose Trump and more how they navigated the process of inserting Trump into their story of themselves as a “moral” majority. This self-understanding promotes and exploits feelings of entitlement, fear, resentment, and the desire to dominate to encourage political action. Because Trump’s speeches affirm these feelings, religious right voters were open to writing a plot twist in their story, casting Trump as a King Cyrus figure, as their champion if not a coreligionist. This article analyzes appeals to and expressions of entitlement, fear, resentment, and the desire to dominate from more than 60 sermons, speeches, and books by religious right authors, Donald Trump, and Trump surrogates. Using open coding, it identifies themes in how these emotions are recognized, affirmed, and invoked by speakers, focusing on Trump’s Cyrus effect.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Simon Power

<p>The United States presidential election in 2000 was one of the closest in history. In 1960, the winner of the popular vote in that presidential election won by the narrowest of margins. Forty years separated the two results, and both involved a sitting Vice President losing to a relative newcomer.  This study sets out the backgrounds of each of the four presidential candidates who competed in 1960 and 2000 and aims to understand the character of each by examining the influences on their lives and the development of their defining character traits. The second aim is to understand the authentic nature of their character by applying several theoretical frameworks to each of them. The application of these theoretical models is done in the context of the outcomes of the 1960 and 2000 elections and, in particular, the losing candidates’ reactions to those results. It is at this most crucial moment that decision-making best reflects whether the candidate’s reaction is authentic in the context of his character development.</p>


Author(s):  
N. Klyukin

The article is devoted to the analysis of the political activities of Donald Trump as the president of the United States of America. The key political issues of the United States interaction with countries such as the China, North Korea, Russia, India and Syria. Each of the issues discussed contributes to the creation of a full-fledged image of Trump as a politician who is a tough, unprincipled leader who takes constant risks in order to achieve certain goals. Despite the number of Trump’s opponents and ill-wishers, his decisions mostly bring dividends and open up new opportunities for his country. Many experts argue that it will be difficult for Trump to maintain a leading position in the upcoming presidential election since the current president currently has rather weak approval ratings.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
Heather M. Claypool ◽  
Alejandro Trujillo ◽  
Michael J. Bernstein ◽  
Steven Young

Presidential elections in the United States pit two (or more) candidates against each other. Voters elect one and reject the others. This work tested the hypothesis that supporters of a losing presidential candidate may experience that defeat as a personal rejection. Before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, voters reported their current feelings of rejection and social pain, along with potential predictors of these feelings. Relative to Trump supporters, Clinton (losing candidate) supporters reported greater feelings of rejection, lower mood, and reduced fundamental needs post-election, while controlling for pre-election levels of these variables. Moreover, as self–candidate closeness and liberal political orientation increased, so too did feelings of rejection and social pain among Clinton supporters. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding human sensitivity to belonging threats and for the vicarious rejection literature.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 318-322
Author(s):  
Ronald J. Pelias

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I find myself struggling, wanting to find a narrative that will let me sleep, but I am unable to find any comfort in the current political landscape. I call upon a fragmentary structure in this autoethnographic essay to display the troubling thoughts and incidents that have assailed me since the election, to point toward a frightening right wing agenda, and to demonstrate why I cannot sleep. Each numbered section offers evidence that the moral core of the United States has been deeply damaged by the election of Donald Trump.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (8) ◽  
pp. 832-860
Author(s):  
Maria Abascal ◽  
Miguel Angel Centeno

Although service to the nation–state features in academic and lay understandings of patriotism, claims of patriotism are rarely examined alongside contributions to the nation–state. The present study examines four behaviors—military enlistment, voting, monetary contributions, and census response—to evaluate the claim that certain parts of the United States, and specifically the communities of “real America,” contribute more than others to the country overall. Consistent with the words of several electoral candidates, ruralness, religiosity, political conservatism, and gun culture collectively identify a distinctive set of communities where residents are both more likely to report “American” as their ancestry and to vote for Republican presidential candidates, including Donald Trump. However, visual and statistical evidence undermine the claim that these communities contribute more than other parts of the country. Instead, and in several respects, these communities make smaller contributions to the nation–state than one would expect based on other characteristics. The findings undermine divisive claims about a “real” America that gives more than its “fair share.”


1986 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 16-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Dellinger

The first part of the seminar examined a mystery that reverberates through two centuries: how does a constitutional system of government, itself born of revolution, properly provide for its own revision — provide literally for its own reconstitution? We first considered the political and intellectual assumptions against which Article V of the United States Constitution — the amendment article — was drafted, and then looked briskly at the historical context in which the Constitution's twenty-six amendments have been adopted. With this as background, we addressed a range of issues concerning the law and policy of constitutional change that are currently the subject of lively dispute in America.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Albert

Scholars of comparative constitutional law would suggest that the United States Constitution is the world’s most difficult democratic constitution to change by formal amendment. This article suggests that the Constitution of Canada may be even harder to amend. Canadian constitutional politics have proven the textual requirements for major constitutional amendment so far impossible to satisfy. But the extraordinary difficulty of formal amendment in Canada derives equally from sources external to the text. Major constitutional amendment also requires conformity with extra-textual requirements imposed by Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Constitution of Canada, parliamentary and provincial as well as territorial statutes, and arguably also by constitutional conventions — additional rules that may well make major constitutional amendment impossible today in Canada. These as yet underappreciated extra-textual sources of formal amendment difficulty raise important questions for Canadian constitutionalism, namely whether in making the Constitution virtually impossible to amend they weaken democracy and undermine the purpose of writtenness.


CALL ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mega Bunga Indriyana ◽  
Yuyun Nurulaen ◽  
Erlan Aditya Ardiansyah

United States presidential election 2020 is the most awaited event for the citizens of the United States. People usually want to get to know how good the presidential candidates are by searching for information about the presidential candidates. Checking the presidential candidates’ social media is one way to find outtheirprofiles.Joe Biden as one of the presidential candidates uses the growing popularity of Instagram to gain public attention by posting some of his responses to current issues and promoting himself as the next President of the United States. It made Joe Biden’s Instagram account is filled with netizens’ comments. This research aims to identify the expressive speech acts that appear in Joe Biden's comments published on September 13, 2020, to January 20, 2021, and to describe the reasons for their use of these expressive speech acts. The instrument of this research is a document.  The data were collected by browsing the comments on Joe Biden’s Instagram post, then the data were selected, and identified the expressive speech acts used by netizens, then the research showed the findings of the research by presenting data and analysis. There are 26 data contained an expressive speech act, in which 10 data as expressive of thanking, 3data as expressive of congratulating, 5 data as expressive of wishing, 8 data as expressive of attitude. The expressive speech act of thanking is the most dominant type of expressive speech act found on the netizens’ comments of Joe Biden Instagram post. In conclusion, netizens’ comments contained the expressive speech act of thanking since netizens appreciated the good things that Joe Biden had planned when he ran for President of the United States. Joe Biden frequently posts his thoughts on various issues and promises a good solution in the future. Netizens expressed their gratitude for Joe Biden because they felt they had found a leader who cared about society.


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