Volume 20, Issue 2

The question, “What is rural?”, has become increasingly salient to scholars of American politics over the past decade, especially after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. While social and political tensions between urban and rural residents of the United States are now widely recognized, rural cannot simply be defined as the antithesis of urban. Using survey data and voting returns from the 2020 election, we illustrate how urban-rural differences are best understood not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum. Large metropolitan core counties comprise one pole of this continuum: their residents are most likely to vote Democratic, and to express liberal attitudes on a variety of topics. At the other pole are counties far from urban areas with no towns, where conservative attitudes are widespread and Republican majorities are substantial. Between the two poles lie a continuum of counties with widely varying positions along the liberal-conservative dimension and voting records to match. We find this urban-rural continuum provides considerable analytical utility even in a multivariate spatial regression model that incorporates numerous other important demographic, economic, and social variables. Our analytical framework takes a step beyond the bipolarity that typically characterizes the discussion of urban and rural America.

We examine Barack Obama’s influence over the Democratic Party as an ex-president from three vantage points: his popularity among partisans, his control over party nominations, and his rhetorical influence over party platform stances. The findings are somewhat mixed. Compared with other contemporary presidents, Obama is far more popular among co-partisan voters. However, he has had only modest influence in presidential nominations, and, unlike other modern presidents, a waning influence on party platform stances. The findings are suggestive not only about Obama’s own interests but also about institutional constraints of modern presidents.

The 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination contest featured an unusually diverse array of candidates. It also featured a historically diverse set of presidential candidate spouses including multiple men and the first openly LGBTQ+ candidate spouse. Spouses have long been among the most important surrogate for presidential candidates because the public views them as an authentic window into the candidate’s suitability for the presidency. Prior surveys of public opinion towards presidential candidate spouses have been conducted only during the general election phase, capturing the public’s views only of the spouses of Democratic and Republican candidates securing the nomination. In this study we draw on a unique nationally representative survey of 400 likely Democratic voters, asking them what they thought of the spouses of the top four presidential candidates in national polling as of the start of the calendar year 2020: Jill Biden, Chasten Buttigieg, Bruce Mann, and Jane Sanders. We use this data to explore the public’s assessment of this diverse group of candidate spouses and the implications for the traditionally gendered role of First Lady.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a disparate impact across populations leaving questions about gendered representation in Congress. We ask whether women and men in Congress wrote “home” about COVID-19 at the same rates and if their attention on gendered topics such as childcare, schooling, and care-taking differed even when the issue space was significantly narrowed. We argue members of Congress use gendered and partisan lenses to frame their positions around the pandemic. We find both parties send a similar number of COVID-19 related messages and that women compared to men – within each party – focus on areas traditionally associated with women’s care-taking duties.

The 2020 presidential election was unparalleled. President Donald Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, indicated that he would not accept the election results, and alleged that there was widespread voter fraud. In addition, on January 6, 2021, Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn his defeat. In this paper, our aim is to understand public perceptions about these topics. We are interested in the distribution of public opinion on these issues but also in whether and how perceptions of these topics are related to intentions to participate in the 2022 midterm elections. Using data from an original, nationally representative survey (n = 1350) conducted in February 2021, we find that those who support the peaceful transfer following the 2020 election are more likely to report intending to vote in 2022 than those who do not. In addition, those who approve of the January 6th attack on the Capitol are more inclined to vote in 2022 than their counterparts. These relationships hold even after controlling for key variables like previous turnout, partisanship, ideology, and demographics.

Following the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump claimed that the election had been stolen and that fraud was widespread. His voter base widely accepted that and that has prompted numerous state legislatures to enact laws creating hurdles that make voting more difficult. The presumption of most reactions to these laws is that they are directed at reducing non-white voting. This study suggests that they may also affect the white working class. The party needs their votes and they have a historical record of not voting at high levels. More hurdles may diminish their turnout. The analysis draws on voting patterns from 1952–2020.

Five models dominate academic analyses of elections for the House of Representatives. They are: (1) the surge and decline cycle of presidential elections and the successive off-year election; (2) the presidential performance model; (3) the retirement model; (4) the campaign spending model; and (5) the candidate quality model. The expected results for the 2022 Congressional election according to the first three models are presented here. Senate elections are not considered. The models differ in their predicted result. The smallest impact on 2022 is associated with the surge and decline cycle; the largest impact is found from incumbent retirements that reflect the prospective short-term forces in the election environment. The average of the three predictions for 2022 finds the Democratic Party losing their majority, giving the Republicans control of the House of Representatives for the 118th Congress.