Maxwell School News and Commentary

Polarization will also likely exist long after President Donald Trump has left the stage, says Jeffrey Stonecash, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science. "A fundamental argument coming out of the Democratic Party is that things are not fair. You have a Republican Party making a moral argument that’s fundamentally different...that it’s not about ‘fairness,’ it’s about who’s more deserving," he writes.

Grant Reeher, professor of political science, says that Trump could be looking to recover after being largely criticized for his performance in the first presidential debate last month, where the candidates traded insults and crosstalk clogged much of the conversation. "I think there's more pressure on (Trump) to remedy that in terms of the way he comes across in this event," he says.

"I think the tone of things would shift quickly if Biden were elected," Professor of Political Science Grant Reeher says. He adds that there would be "more pushback" if Biden and Democrats actually pushed adding seats to the Supreme Court forward.

"I would just say an important difference between Biden and Trump, when the smoke clears, is that Biden wants to work with the allies," says Professor of Economics Mary Lovely.

"We've been talking to the same [3,000] Americans since early March, every six weeks or so," says Shana Gadarian, associate professor of political science. What they found is that Americans were "using their partisanship as the top way to screen new information and decide what to do."

"We thought that the more worried people were about COVID, the more likely they were to be following all of the, kind of public health best practices," says Shana Gadarian, associate professor of political science. "And that's not what we found. What we found was that the biggest divider in people's behaviors was not their age, not their demographics, not their education; it was their partisanship."

Professor Grant Reeher says that Trump's exaggerations of labeling Democrats as socialists and radicals are having little impact, and that, "after four years, voters are used to the hyperbole."

"She was tough,” Kristi Andersen, professor emeritus of political science, says of Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and whose most enduring victory was the passage of her Women's Armed Forces Integration Act giving women permanent roles in the U.S. military. "She held her own, for sure—as most of these people did."