ISPS Post-Election Event on the American Electorate

On December 1, almost 200 attendees signed in to ISPS’ post-election panel event, “Election 2020: “What did voters do and why did they do it?” co-hosted by the Center for the Study of American Politics.

 

The event was led and moderated by ISPS Director Alan Gerber and the participating panelists — Alex Coppock (Yale), Josh Kalla (Yale), Lynn Vavreck ( UCLA), and Michael Podhorzer (AFL-CIO) — discussed the American electorate and the unusual nature of the 2020 presidential election. The topics and research they mostly focused on were party loyalist voters vs. swing voters, why the polls were so off, campaign tactics vs. the importance of messaging, incumbents running during a healthy economy vs. those running during a bad economy, and the effect Covid-19 may have had on voters. 

 

Panelists recommended these readings:

• Gerber & Green, Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout. 2019. Brookings.
• Vavreck, The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns. 2009. Princeton University Press.
• Sides, Tesler & Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. 2019. Princeton University Press.
• Achen & Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. 2016. Princeton University Press.
• Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. 2018. University of Chicago Press.
• Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth. 2020.   
• Online: Nate Cohn on Upshot; Politico Playbook