At the Marschak lecture last Tuesday, Professors Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch discussed the outcome and meaning of the 2024 presidential election. There doesn't appear to be a recording available. But Vavreck's opening argument was that the era of "New Deal" style campaigning was over and that from now on there will be social/cultural campaigns. Yet she seemed to indicate that "economics" was (still) important - which was the essence of the New Deal.
My own sense of it was that while dismissing the outcome as just a fluke (Trump won in 2016 and 2024 and almost won in 2020) is a mistake, there is a broader sense of continuity. What the New Deal brought in was the notion that the federal government - in the person of the president - was important to the average person's welfare. That was not the case in the the 19th century when - except for the Civil War - the central government was much less important and much smaller.
What was clearly a matter of the average person's welfare in 1932 was the collapse of the economy and mass unemployment. Roosevelt was especially good at communicating to the public that he was working on what was adverse to the general welfare - using radio, the new electronic medium of the day - even if he hadn't solved the problem, e.g., unemployment was still high in 1936 and even in 1940, when he won re-election. When the problem was looming war and then actual war he continued to win elections (1940, 1944).
Basically, voters want a sense that "things" are under control (or will be put under control) - with the specific things that matter varying as the world presents them. The economy is likely to rank high among those things, but what other aspects of the economy are important can vary. In the Great Depression, the thing - really the only thing - that mattered was unemployment. In 2024, it was that an uptick in the cost of living outpaced the nominal wage gains of many folks, even though the unemployment rate was relatively low. Trump was clearly better than Biden at presenting himself as the solution to things that seemed to be out of control - prices, wars, border, street crime, campus disturbances - using more contemporary social media as his communication mechanism.
He promised to fix all of them without specifying how he would do so in many cases. But then so did Roosevelt in 1932; he promised just to work on the problem and to try alternative remedies until he succeeded. His incumbent opponent effectively said the problem would just go away if one were patient. That was not a winning message. Incumbent Hoover - shortly before the election - sent the Army in to attack the Bonus Marchers, a demonstration of World War I veterans who were camped out in Washington, DC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkmo4ygPTjc, The Army attacking veterans was not a normal situation. Things were out of control, a bad look for an incumbent.
It may be that in this understanding of the lesson of 2024, the question of social/cultural issues becomes one of diversion and framing. The TV ad to which folks pointed in the recent election was the Trump they/them-you spot. In the ad, while Trump is portrayed as favoring bigger paychecks, the announcer says "Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you." Earlier in the ad, Harris is reported saying she favored transgender surgery for prisoners. So, what is the ad about really about? One interpretation is that it all about anti-transgenderism. But another interpretation is that it is a message that Harris is concerned with something other than what is important to you. And what is likely to be more important to median voters than what they earn?
Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xGBKdpY0rs.
Basically, the political challenge in an election is to convince enough voters that you are the solution to the problem they are then facing and your opponent isn't. Harris was the quasi-incumbent in 2024, which made it difficult for her to say she was the solution to a problem that cropped up during her term. Similarly, it was difficult for Trump in 2020 to say to voters that he was the solution to COVID and its effects when he was the incumbent. Absent COVID, Trump would probably have won in 2020 since the economy - both in terms of prices and unemployment - was doing well and it would have been difficult for Biden to make the case that things would be even better than they had been.
What all this means for higher education, public higher ed, and UC in particular remains to be seen. But in some sense, the political challenge is to make the case that higher ed, public higher ed, and UC are part of the solution. I know that some colleagues dislike the idea of higher ed as a path to an improved position in the labor market. But that is how the median voter sees it. Thus, issues such as tuition, student debt, and job outcomes have to be a major element in how the university represents itself. In some sense, the university is always the incumbent so if it seen as doing a poor job on those dimensions, it will run into difficulty. Doing a good job there, in contrast, is what allows the university to undertake basic research and research into areas that may not be of concern to the median voter, but may be of important value to society.
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