Prophetic Populism and the Violent Rejection of Joe Biden’s Election: Mapping the Theology of the Capitol Insurrection

For President Donald Trump’s most committed Christian devotees—those with ears to hear—his rise to power was prophesied, and the 2016 victory was miraculous. Prophets again foretold re-election in 2020. These charismatic Trump supporters tended to come from outside the main denominations, and when the electoral college swung towards Joe Biden, the results were not accepted. In rejecting the election, they became fellow travellers with more overtly militant and conspiratorial groups—sometimes sharing a stage with them. This article describes the discourse of prophetic populism from 2011 to 2021—focusing in particular on the three months from the 2020 election to the storming of Capitol Hill to the inauguration of Joe Biden. Although Trump repeatedly says, ‘Promises Made, Promises Kept’, these prophetic promises did not materialise—leading some to try to force God’s hand. This article explores the reaction to three consecutive disappointments that took their toll on prophetic populism: the declaration of Joe Biden as president-elect in November 2020, the certification of his victory in early January 2021 and the inauguration later that month. It demonstrates the power of a relatively new force in conservative politics, the flexibility of beliefs in divine involvement and the resilience of these beliefs in light of weighty disconfirming evidence.

Our American Nightmare: The Anachronistic Disaster of the Electoral College

Each year the Margaret Chase Smith Library sponsors an essay contest for high school seniors. The essay prompt for 2021 asked students to offer their opinions on whether the Electoral College has outlived its usefulness, or if it is more important than ever given the country’s current deep political polarization. This is the first-place essay.

Using Facebook data to predict the 2016 U.S. presidential election

We use 19 billion likes on the posts of top 2000 U.S. fan pages on Facebook from 2015 to 2016 to measure the dynamic ideological positions for politicians, news outlets, and users at the national and state levels. We then use these measures to derive support rates for 2016 presidential candidates in all 50 states, to predict the election, and to compare them with state-level polls and actual vote shares. We find that: (1) Assuming that users vote for candidates closer to their own ideological positions, support rates calculated using Facebook predict that Trump will win the electoral college vote while Clinton will win the popular vote. (2) State-level Facebook support rates track state-level polling averages and pass the cointegration test, showing two time series share similar trends. (3) Compared with actual vote shares, polls generally have smaller margin of errors, but polls also often overestimate Clinton’s support in right-leaning states. Overall, we provide a method to forecast elections at low cost, in real time, and based on passively revealed preference and little researcher discretion.

Did Gary Johnson and Jill Stein Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency? A Counterfactual Analysis of Minor Party Voting in the 2016 US Presidential Election

Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote for president in 2016, but lost to Donald Trump in the Electoral College. Trump’s margin of victory in several decisive battleground states was smaller than the combined vote for the two leading minor party candidates: Gary Johnson, of the Libertarian Party, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party. The perception that Johnson and Stein “stole” the 2016 presidential election from Clinton is widespread, and potentially consequential for future minor party candidacies, but it has not yet been rigorously tested. In this article, we extend the analysis of minor party voting in the 1992 election from Lacy, D., and B. C. Burden. 1999. “The Vote-Stealing and Turnout Effects of Ross Perot in the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election.” American Journal of Political Science 43 (1): 233–55, by using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to estimate a multinomial probit model of voting behavior—including outcomes for vote choice and abstention—and calculate the predicted probabilities that Johnson and Stein voters would have voted for another candidate or abstained from voting, had one or both of these candidates been excluded from the ballot. We then reallocate Johnson’s and Stein’s votes accordingly, to estimate Clinton’s and Trump’s counterfactual vote shares nationally and within key battleground states. Our analysis indicates that Johnson and Stein did not deprive Clinton of an Electoral College majority, nor Trump the legitimacy of winning the national popular vote. We estimate that most Johnson and Stein voters would have abstained from voting if denied the choice to vote for their preferred candidate, and that most of Johnson’s remaining voters would have supported Trump.

Ohio primary results will help shape party agendas

Significance Both elections reflected deepening splits within the two parties. The Democratic primary pitched the party’s establishment against its progressive wing, while the Republican race was a test of the weight carried by former President Donald Trump’s endorsement. Ohio’s political environment also makes the two results significant. Impacts Failure to win Trump’s endorsement will not stop other Republicans from running on local issues in upcoming primaries. Ohio’s 18 votes in the Electoral College will make it an important battleground again in the 2024 presidential election. Despite the state’s rightward shift in 2016 and 2020, Democrats are likely to contest it fiercely in both 2022 and 2024.

The Federal Constitution

This chapter describes the Convention that met in Philadelphia from the end of May to mid-September 1787 to draft the new federal Constitution. The Virginia plan, created largely by James Madison, was the working model for the Constitution. It proposed a strong national government with an executive, a bicameral legislature, and a Supreme Court. The main controversy had to do with whether both houses of the legislature would be based on proportional representation as the Virginia plan proposed. The small states objected, and after much debate the Convention agreed to equal representation with two senators from each state. To elect the president, the Convention created an alternative Congress, which became the electoral college. In the state-ratifying conventions the opponents of the Constitution raised the fears of consolidation and aristocracy.

The fragile blue wall: analyzing geographies of the 2020 US presidential election

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.