Wesleyan Faculty on Election Results, Path Forward

Three Wesleyan professors—Professor of Government Erika Franklin Fowler, Associate Professor of Government Logan Dancey, and Assistant Professor of Government Justin Peck—made sense of this year’s election results and the potential path forward during a talk, “The 2024 Election: What Happened and What’s Next?” on Nov. 7.

Fowler, co-director the Wesleyan Media Project, said that there would be careful analysis of the year’s election once all the votes are fully counted. Fowler also cautioned against reading too much into the results or focusing on identity politics until those analyses are completed. She said that many political scientists were able to predict a Trump and Republican Party win overall in their forecasting models based on presidential approval ratings and economic data.

While it was too early to make causal claims about the results in the short term, two factors stuck out. The Democratic Party faced significant challenges in that inflation increased the cost of day-to-day necessities and President-elect Donald Trump was seen as a “change candidate” despite his time as President because Vice President Kamala Harris is tied to the current administration, she said.

“This election cycle, and every election cycle, is about the fundamentals which come down to the distribution of partisanship across our country, approval of the incumbent president or party, the state of the economy, and any other large, big picture events, like wars or natural disaster responses,” Fowler said.

Dancey highlighted the rising “nationalization” among voters in the United States, or the focus on national politics over local politics when voting. He said voters are increasingly voting based on party rather than candidates.

“Over time, we’re increasingly moving into politics where fewer people split tickets, where they make fewer distinctions between candidates and are voting more based on party,” Dancey said. “I think you see that result show up in states like Montana and Ohio, where you had some incumbent Democrats who have been fairly popular for a long time, but weren’t able to withstand this Trump-Republican wave that came through.”

The Republican Party has largely been shaped in Trump’s image, the speakers said. Dancey noted that many of Trump’s Republican critics in Congress have either lost primary elections or retired, resulting in a Republican Party that is likely to be more supportive of Trump’s agenda than congressional Republicans were at the start of Trump’s first term in 2017.

The impact of Trump on the party, and therefore the country, may be immense, as Peck highlighted.

Peck suggested we may look back from the future and compare the domestic consequences of Trump’s re-election to those wrought by Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt became the Democratic Party’s nominee at a moment when the party was nearly collapsed and reformed it into a vehicle for instituting the sweeping policy changes of the New Deal, he said. Trump may be on track to also remake a party that appeared to have collapsed politically.

“How consequential and impactful will the Trump presidency be? I think that potentially we could be living in the world that Donald Trump created for the rest of the lifetimes of people in this room,” Peck said.

The path forward may be uncertain, but Dancey said that citizens looking to make change should get involved in local politics or try to engage with elected officials on policies that they care about. Fowler also recommended that citizens support local news sources to improve access to the information that is key in making electoral decisions.