Uneven Roads and the Populist Challenge in the 2018 and 2020 Elections

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

The 2018 Midterm elections were predicted to be a Blue Democratic Wave, in response to the policy developments in the first 18 months of the Trump administration. Blue waves, women’s anger, the Kavanaugh nomination, the Trump base, migration and immigrant imprisonment were hypothesized as dominating election results in the summer and early fall of 2018. It was not clear at all whether these predications would be borne out based on polling data, the close races in a number of states, and given the strong Republican advantage with Donald Trump’s populist control of the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. Yet although the voting results were tabulated slowly, and after the first few days the outcome seemed conventional, that is, not a significant shift from the 2016 election, finally the impact in the Congress came into focus. The Democrats had won 40 seats, with dramatically larger numbers of Black, Latino and Women and Women of Color members in the House, and more modest change in the Senate than had been predicted.
The roundtable incorporates the work of scholars of race ethnicity and politics, campaigns and elections, and gender and politics to summarize their own findings from the November elections, engage each other in discussion of those electoral dynamics, their impact on the legislative bodies and consider likely prospects for developments in the upcoming 2020 Presidential elections. The participants, co-authors of a major textbook, Uneven Roads: An Introduction to US Racial and Ethnic Politics, will explore the theories summarized and discussed in their book about the growing impact of racial and ethnic groups’ political participation, in comparison with the recent elections. Voting rights policies, the Georgia, Florida and Maryland Gubernatorial elections, the shifts in long-term Republican dominated regions such as California’s Orange County to the Democratic Party, the successful elections of Black Congressional candidates in majority white districts in a number of cases, will be reviewed and examined. The electoral standing of racial and ethnic populations at the state, national and local levels will be summarized. And finally the roundtable will consider the factors that shaped the outcomes in the 2018 elections, and consider whether the factors

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 32: Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Chair

• Todd C. Shaw University of South Carolina

Presenters

• Dianne M. Pinderhughes University of Notre Dame

• Louis DeSipio University of California, Irvine

• Toni-Michelle Travis