In the talk “The 2024 Presidential Election and the State of American Democracy,” held recently at UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library, two faculty members explained how data from the last several political cycles has led them to conclude that voting patterns have shifted in a significant way.
“New Deal politics is not what we’re fighting over anymore. We’re fighting over a new dimension of conflict, and it’s this identity-inflected dimension. And those politics have reshaped the political landscape,” said Lynn Vavreck, UCLA’s Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy, as she showed detailed graphs from the 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 election cycles.
UCLA’s Chris Tausanovitch, a professor of political science and recipient of a Carnegie Fellowship, analyzed how issues, including immigration and abortion, impacted the results of 2024 that led to Donald Trump’s win.
“It's not enough for a candidate to have a whole lot of proposals that the electorate supports,” Tausanovitch said. “It's really about what are the issues that define the campaigns.”
The talk, which you can watch below, was part of the Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences speaker series, which highlights the work of distinguished interdisciplinary researchers across the behavioral sciences fields.
