The 2024 Presidential Election and the State of American Democracy

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Speakers:
Lynn Vavreck, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA
Chris Tausanovitch, Professor of Political Science at UCLA

In an unprecedented election year, what mattered to voters? In this talk, we use data from hundreds of thousands of voters to understand the outcome of the 2024 election and put it in broader context—including what it portends for the future of American democracy.

Chris Tausanovitch is a Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He studies the relationship between constituency opinion and the actions of elected officials in the United States. His book, The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy (with John Sides and Lynn Vavreck) coined the term “calcification” to describe the combination of entrenched partisanship and closely contested elections that characterizes today’s polarized politics. Tausanovitch is Co-Principal Investigator (with Lynn Vavreck) of Nationscape, a project that surveyed 500,000 Americans during the 2020 election cycle, as well as Co-Principal Investigator (with Christopher Warshaw) of the American Ideology Project, a project that produces estimates of the average political ideology of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, county and medium-sized city in the United States. His work has appeared in The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis, among many other outlets. His research has been covered by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle, The Economist, Forbes, Vox and USA Today, among others, and he has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Professor Tausanovitch is a 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Lynn Vavreck is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a contributor to The New York Times. She is a recipient of the Andrew F. Carnegie Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the author or co-author of six books, including The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Election and the Challenge to American Democracy. Her 2016 book, Identity Crisis, was named the “most ominous” book of 2018 by the Washington Post Book Review, and Nate Silver dubbed her 2012 election book the “definitive account” of that election. From 2019 to 2021, she helped develop and manage Nationscape, a 500,000-interview election survey, and from 2020 to 2022 she ran the UCLA COVID-19 Health and Politics Project, a collaboration between medical doctors and social scientists at UCLA and Harvard. At UCLA she teaches courses on campaigns, elections, public opinion and the 1960s. Professor Vavreck holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester and held previous appointments at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and The White House. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she remains a loyal Browns fan and is a “known equestrian” – to draw on a phrase from the 2012 presidential campaign.