2020 Election Review

Saturday, October 08, 2022

Q&A: UCLA political scientists on how the 2020 presidential campaign continues to reverberate: Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch discuss their new book, “ The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy” (cowritten with John Sides of Vanderbilt University). Excerpt from UCLA Newsroom:

You explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and other events in 2020 revealed divisions within the electorate…

Vavreck: No, those factors didn’t reveal divisions — they were subsumed by people’s existing adherence to their parties. That’s an important difference. Those factors should have reshaped politics, but they didn’t — people just doubled down on their party loyalty.

So do you see any hope for fixing the party-above-all mindset that has become the norm?

Tausanovitch: Politics doesn’t offer easy answers to big questions like how to address racism, regulate immigration or address a global pandemic. Our only prescription in the book is that we need to get past this period in which one major party is undermining one of the foundations of our democracy: our trust in the honesty and accuracy of our elections.

We have a lot of problems in this country, but accurately counting ballots is not one of them, so far. That could change if Republicans use election conspiracy theories as a pretext to meddle with the electoral process, and some candidates are currently running on a promise to do exactly that. But if we can get past this conspiracy-mongering, we can get back to the hard work of trying to resolve differences that are hard to reconcile...

Full interview at https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/vavreck-tausanovitch-2020-electionbitter-end-book

To hear the text above, click on the link below:

https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/2020%20election.mp3