scholarly journals CATHOLICS AND THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Author(s):  
Corwin Smidt

This article examines the role of Catholics within the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Although Catholics were once a crucial and dependable component of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition, their vote in more recent years has been much more splintered. Nevertheless, Catholics have been deemed to be an important “swing vote” in American politics today, as in recent presidential elections they have aligned with the national popular vote. This article therefore focuses on the part that Catholics played within the 2020 presidential election process. It addresses the level of political change and continuity within the ranks of Catholics over the past several elections, how they voted in the Democratic primaries during the initial stages of the 2020 presidential election, their level of support for different candidates over the course of the campaign, how they ultimately came to cast their ballots in the 2020 election, and the extent to which their voting patterns in 2020 differed from that of 2016.

Author(s):  
Allan J. Lichtman

The Keys to the White House are an index-based prediction system that retrospectively account for the popular-vote winners of every US presidential election from 1860 to 1980 and prospectively forecast the winners of every presidential election from 1984 through 2008. The Keys demonstrate that American presidential elections do not turn on events of the campaign, but rather on the performance of the party controlling the White House. The Keys hold important lessons for politics in the United States and worldwide. A preliminary forecast based on the Keys indicates that President Obama is a likely winner in 2012, but also reveals the specific problems at home at abroad that could thwart his re-election.


Author(s):  
Allan J. Lichtman

The Keys to the White House are an index-based prediction system that retrospectively account for the popular-vote winners of every US presidential election from 1860 to 1980 and prospectively forecast the winners of every presidential election from 1984 through 2008. The Keys demonstrate that American presidential elections do not turn on events of the campaign, but rather on the performance of the party controlling the White House. The Keys hold important lessons for politics in the United States and worldwide. A preliminary forecast based on the Keys indicates that President Obama is a likely winner in 2012, but also reveals the specific problems at home at abroad that could thwart his re-election.


2020 ◽  
pp. 000276422097506
Author(s):  
Camilo Prado-Román ◽  
Raúl Gómez-Martínez ◽  
Carmen Orden-Cruz

The media and election campaign managers conduct several polls in the days leading up to the presidential elections. These preelection polls have a different predictive capacity, despite the fact that under a Big Data approach, sources that indicate voting intention can be found. In this article, we propose a free method to anticipate the winner of the presidential election based on this approach. To demonstrate the predictive capacity of this method, we conducted the study for two countries: the United States of America and Canada. To this end, we analysed which candidate had the most Google searches in the months leading up to the polling day. In this article, we have taken into account the past four elections in the United States and the past five in Canada, since Google first published its search statistics in 2004. The results show that this method has predicted the real winner in all the elections held since 2004 and highlights that it is necessary to monitor the next elections for the presidency of the United States in November 2020 and to have more accurate information on the future results.


Author(s):  
Jan E. Leighley ◽  
Jonathan Nagler

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine voter turnout in every U.S. presidential election from 1972 through 2008 in order to address four questions regarding the changing political context of turnout. First, how have the demographics of turnout in presidential elections changed or remained the same since 1972? Second, what have been the consequences of the broad set of election reforms designed to make registration or voting easier that have been adopted over the past several decades? Third, what is the impact of the policy choices that candidates offer voters on who votes? And fourth, is the conclusion—of the now classic study of voter turnout in the United States by Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980)—that voters are representative of nonvoters on policy issues accurate, and therefore, who votes does not really matter? The findings on these four questions advance our understanding of turnout and its consequences for representation in fundamental ways.


Author(s):  
Erik Alfred Olsen ◽  

This article explores the role of negative distrust as applied to the 2020 U.S. presidential election focusing specifically on the campaign and sup- porters of President Donald J. Trump. I survey negative campaigning rhetoric, the enlistment of far-right militant groups to his cause and the general political discourse of the Trump campaign and its allies and how these elements created a dangerous environment within the United States leading to the 6 January attack on the U.S. Capitol. Furthermore, I examine how the sowing of con - spiracy theories, fear and disinformation had led directly to a degradation of the presidential election process and for the first time in U.S. history, there was not a safe and smooth transfer of power from one presidential administration to another. Finally, I conclude how the active employment of negative distrust amongst the electorate contributes to political and national instability that threatens not merely constitutional crisis, but the invalidation of the electoral process in the United States in general.


2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-44
Author(s):  
John Agnew ◽  
Michael Shin

US presidential elections are peculiar contests based on mediation by an Electoral College in which votes are aggregated on a state-by-state basis. In 2020, as in 2016, the outcome was decided by a set of states where the two candidates were equally competitive: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two geographical stories tend to dominate accounts of what happened in 2020. The first story is based on red (Republican) versus blue (Democratic) states, and the second story relies upon rural versus urban biases in support for the two parties. After showing how and where Donald Trump outperformed the expectations of pre-election polls, we consider these two geographical stories both generally, and more specifically, in relation to the crucial swing states. Through an examination of the successes of Joe Biden in Arizona and Georgia, two states long thought of as “red”, and the role of the suburbs and local particularities in producing this result, we conclude that the polarization of the United States into two hostile electorates is exaggerated. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (45) ◽  
pp. 27940-27944 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Erikson ◽  
Karl Sigman ◽  
Linan Yao

Donald Trump’s 2016 win despite failing to carry the popular vote has raised concern that 2020 would also see a mismatch between the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the Electoral College. This paper shows how to forecast the electoral vote in 2020 taking into account the unknown popular vote and the configuration of state voting in 2016. We note that 2016 was a statistical outlier. The potential Electoral College bias was slimmer in the past and not always favoring the Republican candidate. We show that in past presidential elections, difference among states in their presidential voting is solely a function of the states’ most recent presidential voting (plus new shocks); earlier history does not matter. Based on thousands of simulations, our research suggests that the bias in 2020 probably will favor Trump again but to a lesser degree than in 2016. The range of possible outcomes is sufficiently wide, however, to even include some possibility that Joseph Biden could win in the Electoral College while barely losing the popular vote.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SEHAT

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.


1972 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 493-501
Author(s):  
John J. Sullivan

THE election of a president in the United States has many mathematical aspects. It is certainly appropriate for teachers to exploit student interest in presidential elections to advance the aims of mathematics classes. The electoral college, apportionment of representatives, population data, and many other features of a presidential election can provide interesting and profitable mathematical exercises. Without difficulty one can devise good problems in arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and statistics.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-56
Author(s):  
Sai Polineni

President Obama's and President Xi Jinping's visits to Tanzania — and the associated jubliation and fanfare accompanying them — seem to validate much of what has been written in the past few years of the supposed competition between the United States and China for influence and resources in Africa, with many authors proclaiming that the U.S. was losing this competition. Aside from propagating the idea that Africa is some sort of homogenous collection of people, ideas, and cultures, many of these authors view the role of Africa as primarily an economic battleground in which the U.S and China must battle to determine control while ignoring the fact that the differing strengths and focuses of the American and Chinese economies do not lend themselves to any sort of outright competition in Africa. 


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