Roughly 80 community members attended a Northwestern Institute for Policy Research panel on Monday afternoon about the 2024 election and threats to American democracy at Scott Hall.
IPR Associate Director and Fellow and political science Prof. Laurel Harbridge-Yong moderated the panel. She began by noting the results of the presidential election showed a rightward shift in voting behavior despite what some polling data predicted.
“In many respects, this was a normal anti-incumbent election that just so happened to benefit an abnormal candidate,” Harbridge-Yong said. “For some Americans, this was an election that was about the strength of our democratic institution. But for many Americans, this was an election that simply looked like most other elections.”
IPR has held a post-election discussion where faculty members share their related research after every presidential election since 2000. Starting in 2014, IPR expanded these panels to include midterm elections.
Lily Schaffer, a communications coordinator for IPR, managed the event and said the institute landed on the title, “The 2024 Election and Threats to Democracy,” before Election Day. No matter which candidate won, she said, the findings of the institute’s researchers were still worth sharing.
The three panelists — psychology Prof. Eli Finkel, political science Prof. Chloe Thurston and policy analysis and communication Prof. Erik Nisbet — briefly highlighted the findings of their studies related to the 2024 election.
Nisbet discussed the impact of the shared campaign message from the two candidates, who both urged Americans to vote because democracy was on the ballot. He posed questions to attendees about the state of American democracy.
“What do you mean by democracy?” Nisbet asked. “Whose democracy? How do we rationalize what is democratic versus undemocratic?”
Nisbet said the “democracy on the ballot” approach to increasing voter turnout in 2024 did not have the impact either candidate thought it would.
He said different voters have different views about what is imperative to maintaining a democratic nation and that democracy does not have a singular definition.
“What is democratic is subjective and depends on very polarized views,” Nisbet said. “Democracy, unfortunately, has become a partisan issue. One of the Democrats’ problems in 2024 was talking about democracy too narrowly.”
Finkel presented his research about trends in tracking the margins of victory in the past few decades of presidential elections. He noted that victory margins have largely followed a linear regression and President-elect Donald Trump’s victory should not have come as a surprise.
The psychology professor said he believes American society has entered a “holy war” of politics in which both sides believe they are standing on the moral high ground.
“As elections get close, you see the parties really focus in on the differences — they force each other to take votes that they know are unpopular,” Finkel said. “There’s a lot of collective action to humiliate the other side and make them look stupid because moral outrage gets your side to the polls.”
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