Month: March 2021

Dr. Francia recently published a paper titled “The White Working Class, Union Households, and Trade: Did the Trump Coalition Endure?”

Abstract: Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election caught many political experts by surprise. Looking to uncover the reasons for this unexpected outcome, social scientists presented several explanations in the election’s aftermath. In this article, I discuss one of these explanations: Trump’s success in winning white working-class voters by an overwhelming margin. I also discuss his success in narrowing the advantage that Democratic presidential candidates typically enjoy with voters in union households. Using data from the 2012 and 2016 National Election Pool (NEP), and the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), the results in this work show that Donald Trump won the support of white working-class voters and was competitive with voters in union households. By expanding previous Republican margins with white working-class voters and by narrowing the Democrats’ typical union household advantage, Trump secured himself victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which ultimately won him the election. Four years later, exit polls indicated that Trump’s support among these groups in the 2020 election was still strong but somewhat diminished.

See: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-020-00553-9

The Basics Explained: The CA Governor Newsom Recall Initiative

So far, the campaign to recall CA Governor Newsom is on track to get “the signatures they need by a deadline of 17 March.[2] “To qualify the recall effort for the 2020 ballot, petitioners must collect 1,495,709 valid signatures, which is equivalent to 12% of the 12,464,235 votes cast in the last election for governor.[1]

If their efforts succeed, a recall election could be held before the end of the year…. It’s still extremely unlikely that a majority of Californians would choose to oust Newsom. State records show almost every California governor since 1960 has faced recall efforts, but only one – Gray Davis in 2003 – has been successfully removed”[2].

But “recalling a governor isn’t easy…. In California, since the recall got put into place back in 1911, there have been 49 efforts to recall a governor… Of that number, only one actually qualified and succeeded — and that was the only against Gray Davis back in 2003.”[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/01/gavin-newsom-california-push-recall.

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/newsom-california-recall-signatures/index.html.

Recent ECU graduate Dennis Cherry is in first year of graduate school in Political Science at George Washington University. Dennis is not only doing well, but he made honor grades in first semester.

Congratulations Dennis!

Dr. Lockerbie has been exploring new methods to teaching statistical methods. He is making use of the open-source statistical program “R.” Using this program means that his students will not have pay any money to perform statistical analyses. Once they have downloaded the program, they do not need internet access to do the assignments. Lockerbie has been able to use the screen share function of Webex, to provide individualized tutorials to his students. Last, by using this program, he is preparing them to be competitive for data science jobs in politics, as this program is mentioned in more job ads than any other statistical program, including SAS, SPSS, and Stata.