Friday February 25, 2022
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
I don’t know about anyone else, but it seems to me that election season is well upon us. Ads for Republican candidates for Ohio’s open U.S. Senate seat have been flooding the part of the airwaves that I watch. So we’re at the intersection of three seasons: Winter, Election, and COVID-19. The last one being longer than the others!
Because of Covid-season, we continue with the “Friday Lunch,” a CWRU tradition since 1989, on Zoom. I would like to think we’ll be able to have some in-person meetings sometime during the term, but it doesn’t look like a discussion with people eating lunch in relatively close quarters is a good idea yet. Maybe after Spring break? I’ll have to make that call soon. Please e-mail me at joseph.white@case.edu if you have thoughts.
For now, we’ll continue presenting experts from campus and sometimes beyond to discuss important issues for the university, local community, nation or the international stage. This Friday one of the leading scholars on congressional elections will talk about one of the really interesting questions about what happened in 2020 and what might happen in 2022 and beyond.
This Week’s Program
The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on the 2020 U.S. election. It influenced the political dialog, the conduct of the campaigns, voter decision-making, turnout, and possibly the outcome. It also affected how the states conducted the election. Under the Constitution states have primary responsibility for administering elections, and the states’ responses to the pandemic were far from uniform. That leads to two questions: what explains any variation in state policies, and whether the choices to expand access more or less affected turnout and the margin between the parties.
One might think that more liberal states expanded voting more, but that’s not quite so obvious. After all, more liberal states should have had easier voting to begin with, making it harder to expand access. We might also imagine that some measures to expand access, such as voting by mail, would be particularly helpful in rural areas, which vote more Republican. Or we might guess that in states that are not competitive, the dominant party might see less risk from expanding access, while in closer states that would be more controversial.
Although state responses varied, the overall effect was to make voting much easier. Easier voting combined with the intensity of partisan disagreement to increase turnout by nearly seven percentage points over the level in 2016. Both Democratic- and Republican-leaning groups turned out at much higher rates than in previous years.
What, then, explains what individual states did, and what were the effects? What are the implications of that for understanding the 2020 election and the subsequent efforts to make access more difficult (or, in a few states, a bit easier). Paul Herrnson, author of one of the leading textbooks on congressional elections, has new research on the topic. He joins us to report on that research with perspective from the broader trends in U.S. elections.
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrcemprDouHtYtbBo1zo46tkNS1V0FA3Cr
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
It is a pleasure to welcome back, though only virtually, Professor Paul Herrnson, who was here in person for two lectures in 2015, and whose work has been taught in various iterations of our courses on Congress and on interest groups. Professor Herrnson earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin as well as an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University and B.A. from Binghamton. After earning his Ph.D. he served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, before moving to the University of Maryland, where he would be promoted to Associate Professor and then Professor. He moved to UConn in 2013. Paul was an American Political Science Congressional Fellow in the office of the Honorable David E. Price from 1989-90, and directed the Center for American Politics and Citzenship of the University of Maryland from 2000 to 2013. He also served as Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research from 2013-2015.
Paul’s primary interests include political parties and elections, money in politics, public opinion, and voting technology including ballot design. His Congressional Elections: Campaigning at Home and in Washington is one of the two main textbooks on the topic, published in eight editions from 1995 – 2020. Among other books, he and colleagues published Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot in 2008 and he has been coeditor of 14 volumes, of which Joe White’s personal favorite is The Interest Group Connection: Electioneering, Lobbying, and Policymaking in Washington 2nd ed. because Joe has a long article in it. Professor Herrnson’s work has been supported by generous grants to himself and research team colleagues from, among other sources, the National Science Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and Maryland State Board of Elections. It includes over a hundred articles and book chapters and dozens of reports for government agencies.
Paul enjoys teaching and specializes in courses on congressional elections and the introductory lecture course on American politics.
Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:
March 4: The Present and Future of Cryptocurrency. With Peter Zimmerman, Ph.D., Research Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
March 11: Spring Break
March 18: Inflation. With Mark Sniderman, Ph.D., Executive in Residence and Adjunct Professor of Economics, Weatherhead School of Management; former Executive Vice President, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
March 25: Covid-19 Through Covid-22: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same? Wtih Mark Cameron, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences.
April 1: The French Presidential Election. Wtih Patrick Chamorel, Ph.D., Senior Resident Scholar and Lecturer, Stanford in Washington, Stanford University.
April 8: Greening the Grid: The Energy Storage Challenge. With Robert F. Savinell, Ph.D, Distinguished University Professor and George S. Dively Professor of Chemical Engineering.
April 15: TBA
April 22: TBA |
