During Election Day and in the days following, media have cited UCLA research and turned to UCLA faculty for expert insights on a range of election-related topics. A roundup of their comments follows.
For daily summaries of UCLA faculty comments in local, national and international media, visit UCLA In the News.
Police welcome Trump's return to the White House
Joanna Schwartz, professor of law
NPR’s “Morning Edition” (Nov. 15)
Trump has also made vague campaign promises of greater legal immunity for police, even as it’s become slightly more common for local prosecutors to charge police for unjustified use of force.
“I’m not sure that that is something the federal government can do,” says Joanna Schwartz, a UCLA law professor who has written about police accountability.
“It’s hard to imagine how the federal government can constitutionally override local prosecutors’ decisions to press criminal charges,” she says. “On the other hand, the Supreme Court last term by my view created presidential immunity out of thin air. So it’s certainly possible.”
Trump immigration targets: Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Haitians
Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law
New York Times (Nov. 15)
[Temporary Protected Status] helped relieve pressure on Democrat–led cities, like New York, Chicago and Denver, struggling to assist tens of thousands of migrant arrivals. The mayors of those cities urged the administration to allow the migrants to work so that they could achieve self-sufficiency more quickly, and Temporary Protected Status was the answer.
Ahilan Arulanantham, who was lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case that in 2020 reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said that he was prepared for another court battle to defend the program.
“The statute requires that the government undertake an objective assessment of the conditions for each country to decide whether that country is safe for the return of nationals,” said Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.
“Haiti, which has been the subject of intense political controversy, is obviously very unsafe at the moment,” he said.
Trump wants to use a 226-year-old law to deport millions of undocumented migrants. Can he do it?
Hiroshi Motomura, the Susan Westerberg Prager professor of law at UCLA School of Law
CBC (Nov. 15)
Donald Trump’s pathway to deporting millions of undocumented migrants may hinge on a 226-year-old law that was last used to detain non-citizens of Japanese, German and Italian descent during the Second World War.
The 1798 Alien Enemies Act is a potential tool the U.S. president-elect has said he will use to try to make good on one of his key campaign pledges that otherwise could be stalled significantly by the legal machinations of the deportation process.
Hiroshi Motomura, the faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law at UCLA, says the text of the Aliens Enemy Act doesn’t seem to apply to this situation.
Motomura says the so-called invasion wouldn’t be referring to people who are just showing up in caravans at the border, but to people who have been in the U.S. for a long time.
The U.S.-China tech race is moving from chips to the raw materials they’re made of
Christopher Tang, distinguished professor of business administration in the UCLA Anderson School of Management
Business Insider (Nov. 13)
As Bloomberg reported last month, the U.S. is considering limiting export licenses for both Nvidia and AMD chips in an unfolding trade war that has also hit several sensitive industries, including electric vehicles, batteries and some solar panels.
The U.S. imposed similar trade limits, embargoes and economic sanctions on the Soviet Union, North Korea, China and North Vietnam during the Cold War.
“I think the heart of the issue is concern about how China will use AI chips for military applications and surveillance,” Christopher Tang, a UCLA professor and expert in global supply chain management and the impact of regulatory policies, told Business Insider. “It’s a different type of Cold War.”
The common national experience that explains Trump’s 2024 gains
Lynn Vavreck, UCLA’s Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy
CNN (Nov. 12)
Harris’ loss, as a quasi-incumbent, followed a well-established pattern: When an outgoing president faces widespread discontent over his performance, his party has almost always failed to hold the White House in the election to succeed him. (That dynamic applied when Democrats Harry Truman in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968 stepped down rather than seek reelection, and again in 2008 with Republican George W. Bush leaving office after his two terms.)
“People struggle to find explanations for what is going on with Hispanic men, or with young people, but the most common explanation [to all of them] is the right one,” said UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck, the co-author of well-respected books on the 2016 and 2020 elections. “Nobody thinks things are going well, and if you are the incumbent you own that.”
With deportations at the top of Trump’s list, California immigrants ‘prepare for the worst’
Talia Inlender, deputy director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law
Los Angeles Times (Nov. 12)
Advocates also plan to push back against efforts to expand immigrant detention facilities and ensure the state utilizes its watchdog powers. A new California law allows county health officers to inspect immigrant detention facilities. But GEO Group, which operates most of the state’s facilities, sued last month, saying the requirement significantly burdens federal immigration enforcement in violation of the Constitution.
“We’ve been here before,” said Talia Inlender, deputy director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA. “And we know how to fight back.”
Trump is handing China a golden opportunity on climate
Alex Wang, professor and faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law
The Atlantic (Nov. 11)
The Biden administration did manage to nudge China to be more ambitious in some of its climate goals, leading, for example, to a pledge to reduce methane emissions. But the Trump administration will likely shelve ongoing U.S.-China climate conversations and remove, for a second time, the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which requires participants to commit to specific emissions-reduction goals. Last time around, Trump’s withdrawal made China look good by comparison, without the country necessarily needing to change course or account for its obvious problem areas, like its expanding coal industry. The same will likely happen again, Alex Wang, a law professor at UCLA and an expert on U.S.-China relations, told me … Under Biden, the U.S. was attempting to compete in the green-soft-power arena by setting up programs to help clean-energy transitions in Indonesia or Vietnam, Wang noted. “But now I suspect that those federal efforts will be eliminated.
In a historic shift, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors will nearly double in size
Zev Yaroslavsky, executive director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA
Los Angeles Times (Nov. 12)
Zev Yaroslavsky, who was a supervisor for two decades, said he expects an “army” of candidates to be interested in the new seats.
The chief executive position could even prove alluring to sitting supervisors, he said, granting one lucky politician “the biggest bully pulpit in Southern California.”
“This will be the most powerful elected local government official in the state of California,” said Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “I think they would be engaging in political malpractice if they didn’t look at it, but they won’t be the only ones.”
Are Los Angeles County voters becoming more conservative? Experts weigh in
Zev Yaroslavsky, executive director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA
Daily Breeze (Nov. 11)
So is Los Angeles County — where Democrats make up 52% of registered voters and Republicans make up 18% — becoming more conservative?
Before anyone reaches for that red crayon, one political expert had a message: Yes, voters here voted a bit more conservatively this year. But make no mistake, Los Angeles is still a Democrat-heavy county — and that won’t change anytime soon.
“L.A. County is a blue county. That’s not going away. How blue it’s going to be — dark blue or medium blue or light blue? It’s a little less dark blue than it was a week ago,” said Democrat Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. city council member and former L.A. County supervisor who now serves as director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Why American Jews didn’t join the Trump wave
Op-ed by Dov Waxman. Dov Waxman, director of UCLA’s Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Professor of Israel Studies
Haaretz (Israel) (Nov. 11)
The big news about the “Jewish vote” in the 2024 U.S. presidential election is that there are no news. In an election widely regarded as the most important in decades, if not in the entire history of the United States — when American democracy and America’s preeminent role in the world appeared to be at stake — Jewish American voters behaved much the same way they have for decades.
Will Trump curb transgender rights? After election, community prepares for worst
Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law
USA Today (Nov. 11)
About 5% of young adults identify as transgender or nonbinary, about three times the rate of the general population, according to a Pew Research Center pollreleased in 2022. Data compiled by the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles indicates about 300,000 youth aged 13 to 17 identity as transgender nationwide.
Among Trump’s proposals are passing laws banning what he calls “child sexual mutilation,” eliminating healthcare providers offering gender-affirming care for youth from Medicare or Medicaid eligibility and supporting private lawsuits against doctors who offer such care.
Trump’s star rises as California shifts to political center. ‘Even progressives have limits’
Ann Carlson, the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at UCLA School of Law
Sacramento Bee (Nov. 10)
After spending months attempting to “Trump-proof” California’s climate agenda, state leaders are bracing for four years of opposition to an incoming president, who on the campaign trail promised to threaten California clean air rules, amp up oil production, and repeal the Biden administration’s landmark climate law pouring billions into clean energy.
California will not slow its fight against global warming during a second Trump
administration, said Ann Carlson, a UCLA environmental law professor who served as head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under Biden.
“If we see the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris agreement, if we see the immediate rollback of a number of climate regulations and efforts to scale back the Inflation Reduction Act, I think you’re going to see a vacuum at the federal level that gets filled by states, Carlson said.
After Trump’s win, some women are considering the 4B movement
Ju Hui Judy Han, assistant professor of gender studies
CNN (Nov. 9)
4B is a shorthand for the four Korean words bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae and bisekseu, which translate to no marriage, no childbirth, no dating and no sex with men.
The 4B movement emerged in South Korea around 2015 or 2016, per Ju Hui Judy Han, an assistant professor in gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mostly popular among young women in their 20s, she described it as a fringe offshoot of #MeToo and other feminist movements that arose in response to stark gender inequality in the country.
Proposition 36: How California got convinced to lock more people up
Claudia Peña, lecturer at UCLA School of Law and founding co-director of UCLA Prison Education Program
The Intercept (Nov. 9)
Claudia Peña, a longtime community organizer and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles law school, said such rhetoric during the presidential campaign, specifically from Republicans, had an influence on the way people saw crime locally, including in blue California.
“So much of their argument was based on fearmongering and ensuring people are scared of each other, really targeting vulnerable groups,” she said. “And they did that by overemphasizing, manipulating and exaggerating certain trends that began during the pandemic. I think because they were so successful at doing that on a national scale all over television, all over these podcasts, it did have an effect in California.”
Peña attributed the passage of Prop 36 and failure of the measure prohibiting forced prison labor, in part, to Trump’s rhetoric of fear but also said she doesn’t think Californians are swinging the opposite direction from 2020, calling the bills “an aberration.” She noted that Prop 36 was marketed as a “middle of the road” and “balanced” bill that was less extreme than crime bills of the 1990s.
How did Donald Trump win back the presidency?
Lynn Vavreck, UCLA’s Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy
The Economist (Nov. 8)
Podcast: In a stunning victory Donald Trump comfortably defeated Kamala Harris, meaning that America’s 45th president will become its 47th. How did he do it?
John Prideaux hosts with Charlotte Howard and Idrees Kahloon. They’re joined by The Economist’s Owen Winter, James Bennet and Adam O’Neal, as well as political scientists Lynn Vavreck and John Sides.
Election fraud? Claims disappear after Trump victory
Richard Hasen, professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law
The Hill (Nov. 8)
Trump won the Electoral College and is on track to win the popular vote as well, which would make him the first Republican to do so since 2004.
Throughout his campaign to win back the White House, he repeatedly cast doubt on the process, often saying the only way he could lose an election is if it was “rigged.”
“The voter fraud charges were never serious. They were a way to delegitimize Democratic victories and to provide a pretext for possibly seeking to contest or overturn the results in a close election in which a Democrat won,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“I expect the claims will be revived again when they might serve a political purpose. And in the meantime they prove to be a useful boogeyman.”
California versus Trump: One of the biggest battles could be over your car
Julia Stein, deputy director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law
San Francisco Chronicle (Nov. 8)
As was the case during Trump’s first term, litigation over how California proceeds with its vehicle rules is likely to ensue. After the state’s suit over the loss of its waiver in 2019, 17 more conservative states and fossil fuel advocates unsuccessfully challenged the legality of the EPA’s waiver program. This coalition is still hoping the Supreme Court takes up the issue and reconsiders whether California should take the lead on emissions.
“California was a little vulnerable with the waiver regardless of what happened this week,” said Julia Stein, deputy director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law.
Recent Supreme Court cases curbing the EPA’s authority have worried many, including Stein, that the waiver program could be next for the justices to undo.
Here’s what a second Trump presidency could mean for Los Angeles
Monika Langarica, senior staff attorney at UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy
LAist (Nov. 8)
Trump made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign, and promised on his first day in office to close the U.S. border with Mexico and restrict migrants from seeking asylum.
Those policies, if carried out, have the potential to profoundly disrupt daily life in L.A. County, where one-in-three residents are immigrants and 8% lack legal authorization, according to USC Dornsife’s 2024 State of Immigrants report.
“We can expect Trump's approach to the border to include policies and practices that intentionally seek to foment chaos,” said Monika Langarica with the UCLA School of Law’s Center for the Immigration Law and Policy.
But Langarica said California has already enacted local policies to limit cooperation between federal immigration officials and local law enforcement, who would need to play a crucial role in scaling up deportation efforts to meet Trump’s goals.
How a new Trump term might affect health in California
Mark Peterson, professor of public policy, political science and law at UCLA
Los Angeles Times (Nov. 8)
Trump tried unsuccessfully to roll back the Affordable Care Act during his first term. This time around, Trump has said he would only replace the landmark law if a better plan were devised.
Vance raised the idea of dividing up “risk pools,” which are used to share medical costs and calculate insurance premiums. Critics cautioned that doing so could drive up rates for elderly people with chronic conditions.
Mark Peterson, a professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said that despite continued jabs at the law, “it’s very unlikely that Republicans will want to take on the Affordable Care Act. It did not go well for them last time ... and now the Affordable Care Act is more popular than ever.”
How would Trump’s mass deportation plan impact L.A.?
Amada Armenta, associate professor of urban planning and faculty director of UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute
KNX-FM (Nov. 7)
The Pew Research Center estimates there are a little under 2 million undocumented immigrants living in California, so the state would feel those mass deportation more than anywhere else in the country. What would it mean for the society and economy of Southern California? …
[Amanda] Armenta said that 9 million children in California are part of immigrant families, and about 20% of them live in mixed-status families with some relatives who have legal status and others who don’t.
“The consequences of these policies for U.S. citizens and for California children are going to be really large,” Armenta said. “We know that when people are afraid of roundups, children stop going to school. This has implications for their learning. And we know that people stop going to the doctor, people stop reporting crimes to the police.”
Daughter of L.A. Times owner says endorsement decision stemmed from Harris stance on Gaza war
Jim Newton, lecturer and founding editor-in-chief of UCLA Blueprint magazine
New York Times (Nov. 7)
Jim Newton, a former editorial page editor of the paper who is now a historian and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, shared an email exchange he had with Ms. Tang, after the news broke, in which he urged Ms. Tang to reconsider. The decision not to endorse, he told her, set back years of effort to restore the paper “to a place of civic responsibility and candor with readers” and “unravels a lot of hard, important work, and at a particularly unwise time.”
How the Latino vote helped propel Trump to victory
Latino Data Hub | Latino Policy and Politics Institute
Bloomberg (Nov. 7)
The Latino vote in the swing states was a major force that helped Trump win but it was not the sole deciding factor. Pennsylvania was the biggest prize among the swing states. About 579,000 Latinos were eligible to vote there, according to the Latino Data Hub at the University of California, Los Angeles. The backlash against the Puerto Rico joke was expected to help Harris in the state. Yet Trump captured 42% of Latino votes there — 15 percentage points more than in 2020, the data showed. He won the state by about 133,000 votes in 2024, after losing it to Biden in 2020 by about 81,000 votes.
Florida’s abortion vote and why some women feel seen: ‘Even when we win, we lose’
Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies
USA Today (Nov. 7)
On election night, [abortion advocates in Florida] suffered a crushing blow: Amendment 4, which set out to overturn the state’s 6-week abortion ban, failed to pass with 57.1% of votes, falling just under 3% short of the 60% majority needed in the state …
Most states require a simple majority vote to pass ballot measures. So did Florida, until a 2006 constitutional amendment passed, changing the threshold for voter approval to 60%. (Ironically, it passed with only 57.78% of the vote.)
“The truth is that if you look back on any major civil rights struggle in the United States, you have to be in it for the long game... You have to fight harder, you have to be more resilient than seems humanly possible,” says Juliet Williams, a professor of gender studies at UCLA, says. “Absolutely it’s a setback. But we wake up another day, we keep the struggle. We can’t control the timeline around the victory, but we can say we’re in it for the duration.”
Lara Trump touts changes to election process after inauguration
Richard Hasen, professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law
Newsweek (Nov. 7)
Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and wife of Donald Trump’s son Eric, has said that, after her father-in-law’s inauguration, the Republican-controlled government should look into changing the U.S. election process … While the details of this potential change to the U.S. electoral process are thin, the suggestion of the RNC co-chair seems to confirm many experts’ fears that Donald Trump’s return to the White House might significantly transform American democracy…
“Congress has broad powers to regulate congressional elections in Article I, section 4, [of the U.S. Constitution]” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Newsweek. “In my experience, state and local election officials strongly resist attempts to centralize any election administration powers in the federal government,” he added. “Usually it is Republicans who strongly resist federalization of elections. So this will be interesting to watch if it happens.”
Donald Trump’s victory was resounding. His second term will be, too
Lynn Vavreck, UCLA’s Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy
The Economist (Nov. 7)
Democrats who are tempted to explain away Ms. Harris’s defeat as part of a global wave of anti-incumbency may be missing something more fundamental. In 2016, when Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Democrats dismissed the result as an electoral-college aberration fuelled in part by racism, sexism and Russian disinformation. But this year, with Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with the backing of a multiracial, working-class coalition, such arguments are harder to sustain.
“People scratch their heads, like, ‘Oh, these Latino men, these Black men, why are they moving to Trump?’ And the answer is, they’re conservative,” says Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles. The Democratic turn in recent years towards left-wing identity politics, with talk of decriminalising illegal immigration, defunding the police and championing critical race theory, did not endear them to minorities, as intended. Even though Democrats like Ms. Harris had recanted such views and begun to ape Mr. Trump’s approach to crime, trade and immigration, they failed to stanch their losses among Black and Hispanic men and unionised workers.
What Trump’s win means for the world’s most pressing problems
Researchers at the UCLA’s North American Integration and Development Center
Washington Post (Nov. 6)
As polls showed voters broadly disapproving of the Biden administration’s handling of the border with Mexico, securing it was central to Trump’s campaign … Near the top of the Trump campaign’s agenda is a promise to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” U.S. authorities lack the capacity to round up and deport millions of immigrants, but Trump said he’ll use National Guard troops.
The United States and Mexico, in particular, could feel “devastating effects” as a result of massive deportations, according to a paper written in part by researchers at the North American Integration and Development Center at the University of California at Los Angeles. The paper notes the two countries are “highly interdependent through dense migration, remittance and trade relations.”
What’s at stake for Mexico in a second Trump presidency?
Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, associate professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and founding director of the UCLA North American Integration and Development Center
New York Times (Nov. 6)
While a mass deportation program would face legal and logistical challenges, Raúl Hinojosa, director of U.C.L.A.’s North American Integration and Development Center, said that there are growing concerns about the effect that the such deportations could have on Mexico. If Mexican migrants are sent home, much of the money they send back to Mexico — $63 billion in 2023 — would plummet, depleting Mexico’s economy of one of its most important sources of income, Mr. Hinojosa said.
L.A. voters pick Hochman as D.A., want to tax themselves to fight homelessness
Jim Newton, lecturer and founding editor-in-chief of UCLA Blueprint magazine
KCRW 89.9-FM’s “Press Play” (Nov. 6)
“I think it’s fair to say that [district attorneys] are part of setting a tone for a region or a state or a county in terms of crime. But the fact is that charging decisions and prosecutions really are not directly related to crime. We’re about to have a new police chief in Jim McDonnell. I think it’s fair to hold Jim McDonnell responsible for crime in the city of L.A. and trends that way, but I think Hochman did a good job of trying to grab on to that issue. But I’m not sure that I’m really persuaded that D.A.’s actually are that influential in setting the level of crime up or down.”
Ex-federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman declares victory in L.A. district attorney race
Jim Newton, lecturer and founding editor-in-chief of UCLA Blueprint magazine
Daily Breeze (Nov. 6)
“Gascón infuriated even lots of (his own) supporters,” Newton said. “He came into office the first day, issued all these memos that set this new course for prosecutorial strategy and principles ... That antagonized a lot of people in the office who felt he hadn’t consulted them.” Newton said he’s spoken with some people who previously donated to Gascón’s campaign but later felt he wasn’t accessible to listening to their ideas.
California’s resistance is still finding its footing
Ann Carlson, the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at UCLA School of Law
Politico (Nov. 6)
California climate leaders were prepared for this moment — but they’re still getting their footing as they come out of the gate. “Everybody’s in kind of stunned shock,” said UCLA environmental law professor Ann Carlson, who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under President Joe Biden. “But with the reality of what is about to play out, I can’t see people being passive about it.”
“Next week will be interesting in the [U.N. COP29] global climate talks because, suddenly, the Biden administration is in this weird position where it represents the United States for another couple of months. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a lot of attention paid to where California is coming from and what it’s saying.”
Climate scientists fear Trump will destroy progress in his second term
Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Independent (Nov. 6)
Partisan politics will likely put the U.S. in reverse on the fight against climate change, and scientists expect Trump to pull out of the Paris Agreement once again. Biden rejoined the agreement on his first day in office.
“The U.S. will very likely leave the Paris Agreement,” UCLA climate scientist Dr. Daniel Swain said. “Domestic policy will very much shift in a direction that favors continuing to generate a record-breaking amount of fossil fuel energy.”
“I think that everything is likely to be very different in a few years. Especially, given that it isn’t just the presidential outcome. Everything from the presidency, to Congress, to the courts, will be in lock-step alignment with doing the opposite of what we need to do to solve these problems,” said Swain.
Donald Trump flipped Pennsylvania red partly by shrinking Democratic margins in Philly, suburbs
UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute
Philly Voice (Nov. 6)
In the final weeks before this year’s election, a statewide poll from Equis Research found that Harris led Trump among Latinos by 55% to 36% — trailing Biden’s 61% performance in 2020 and Clinton’s 66% in 2016. Democrats had been counting on the state’s large Puerto Rican population to remain a bulwark against Trump’s gains, but the growth of the state’s broader Latino population gave Republicans new supporters to cut into margins from past elections. Pennsylvania has an estimated population of about 579,000 Latino voters, making up about 6% of eligible voters. The growth of Latino voters also is outpacing the growth of Pennsylvania’s non-Latino voting population, according to UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute.
What does a Donald Trump presidency mean for LGBTQ+ rights?
Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law
Context (Nov. 6)
Trump has also vowed to “cut the left-wing gender programs” from the military and remove Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucrats from universities.
A 2024 study from UCLA’s Williams Institute into the impact of anti-DEI legislation on LGBTQ+ faculty members at universities found such policies negatively impacted their teaching, research, relationship with students, and health.
How to use election outcome to teach about regulating emotions
Center for the Developing Adolescent at UCLA
K–12 Dive (Nov. 6)
While polarizing political issues can inflame tempers and raise stress levels, some say elections also offer opportunities to help students connect with peers and develop their identities and self agency — even if most of them are too young to vote.
Adults can proactively talk to youth about the potential for strong feelings regarding election outcomes — and acknowledge and empathize with their emotions, suggests an Oct. 28 paper from the Center for the Developing Adolescent at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Your guide to the status of LGBTQ+ issues on the ballot after Election Day
Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law
Yahoo! News (Nov. 6)
Same-sex marriage has been legal in all 50 states for nearly a decade, ever since the Supreme Court struck down all state bans in its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision. But if we’ve learned anything from the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in June 2022, in which the high court’s conservative majority overturned 50 years of reproductive rights precedent — a decision president-elect Donald Trump bragged about — it’s that Supreme Court rulings are not set in stone.
About 80% of same-sex married couples are worried that SCOTUS will overturn the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, according to a June report from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Harris or Trump? A lot at stake for California students
John Rogers, professor of education and director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access
EdSource (Nov. 5)
Conservative groups leveraged parental angst over Covid-19 school closures and masking policies to ignite a “parents’ rights” movement that has since pushed back against educational policies on gender identity and racial equity, which Trump has vowed to eliminate. Some school board meetings have been so incendiary that school districts have had to pay for additional security to keep unruly audiences in order. Some think a Trump victory will further embolden far-right conservative activists.
“I think that a Trump victory will lead some on the right to take the message that these sorts of cultural attacks that have been playing out across the United States, and across California in the last couple of years, are an effective strategy for mobilizing the base and for energizing an electorate,” John Rogers, director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, told EdSource.
On the influence of religious faith in the election
Octavio Pescador, research associate and co-founder of the Paulo Freire Institute at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies
EFE (Nov. 5)
Octavio Pescador at the University of California Los Angeles explained to EFE that among Latinos, voting based on religion has been changing in recent decades. “Because it is a Catholic majority, Latinos were always related to Democrats when talking about religion, but since the 1980s, more evangelical immigrants began to arrive, who have established their churches and support conservatism more,” explains the professor. (Translated from Spanish.)
Voter participation among young Latinos is low. A Santa Ana group aims to change that
UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute
Orange County Register (Nov. 5)
Pew Research Center reports that Latino Americans have the lowest consistent voter turnout rates when compared to other racial groups. In the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections, nearly half (47%) of Latino citizens nationwide did not vote, while 33% voted in one or two elections and only 13% voted in all three.
A report from the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute revealed the Latino community also had the lowest national registration rate — only 61% — of all racial and ethnic groups in the 2020 election. The disparity was also reflected in registration rates across California.
Election lawsuits are happening more often. These are the flashpoints
Richard Hasen, professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law
Barron’s (Nov. 5)
“We are far from the only country that has polarized politics,” says Richard Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But we are really the only country among modern democracies that fights so much over our voting rules.”
“If it’s a game of inches, they are looking to score, whatever advantage they can,” Hasen says.
The U.S.’s federalist system means national elections are conducted under rules set by more than 10,000 jurisdictions. Mix that decentralization with today’s polarized, paranoid politics, and America is a land of opportunity for election lawyers.
Could this presidential election be decided by the Supreme Court?
Richard Hasen, professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law
New York Times (Nov. 5)
The Supreme Court has generally tried to stay out of political and electoral fights, and most election-related litigation will remain in the lower courts. But once a case is in the court system, it becomes possible that the Supreme Court chooses to take it up.To do so, the court would need to determine that it had jurisdiction over the issue and that a candidate was bringing forward a legitimate legal challenge, such as how certain classes of ballots should be treated. This is a high bar to overcome.
“If there are no real good theories as to why there was some major flaw in how an election was run, then I really don’t see a pathway to litigating from being behind in an election to being a winner,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
Oakland and Berkeley youth get ready to vote for the first time
UCLA’s Laura Wray-Lake, Christopher Wegemer, Ryo Sato, Leslie Ortiz and Amy Wong
KQED (Nov. 5)
A recent study from the University of California, Los Angeles, found it’s easier to initiate voting habits in high schoolers before barriers such as work and moving to new places separate them from civic institutions. Another 2016 study found that people who start voting regularly early in life are more likely to vote consistently throughout their lives.
How SCOTUS is using a slippery legal principle to help Republicans
Richard Hasen, professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law
Slate (Nov. 5)
There is a lot of talk about the Purcell principle in legal circles around election time. To be sure, some of the people using the term do not know what it means, and many of us hearing it really don’t know what it means. So how does this doctrinally complicated “principle,” grounded in vibes and untethered from law, actually work? Dahlia Lithwick was joined by Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, on this week’s Amicus podcast to figure that out.
