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Prologue to 2024

  • Byron E. Shafer EMAIL logo and Regina L. Wagner
Published/Copyright: May 7, 2025
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Abstract

Electoral contests in presidential years bring out a plethora of analyses of the specifics of the contest, enriched by assertions about the unprecedented character of whatever has just happened. Yet the same contests are more or less automatically the register of an ongoing, shaping context for the ultimate result. This paper is an effort to tease out these basic background influences in advance, while demonstrating both their continuity and their roles in the governing administrations that followed. The paper begins with the coming of a modern era in American politics, characterized by split partisan control as the default electoral outcome. It then moves to the diagnostic characteristic of succeeding years, in the rise of the activists. The basic structural factors that characterize this extended period are then brought to life through the specific processes of policy-making in the Trump and then the Biden administrations. Together, these make the ongoing structure of American politics evident – and a larger contribution to the particular results of 2024 than are those various and diverse excitements of the moment.


Corresponding author: Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, E-mail:

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Published Online: 2025-05-07

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