Following former President Donald Trump’s victory in this year’s elections, political science scholars discussed the future of the country at a joint panel hosted by the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Wednesday night.
The panel, titled “What Happens Next? Unpacking the 2024 Presidential Election,” was moderated by Wendy Schiller, the interim director of the Watson Institute and director of the Taubman Center.
“The election was one of the most hotly contested and divisive that I’ve seen,” Schiller told The Herald. Regardless of the results, Schiller wanted to make sure “there’d be a forum for people to talk about it and hear from political scientists about it the day after,” she said.
Panel members included Richard Arenberg, a senior fellow of international and public affairs, and assistant political science professors Marques Zárate and Paul Testa.
Testa kicked off the panel by analyzing the presidential election results and comparing them to the 2020 election.
Evaluating the results by county, Testa found that “Trump is outperforming his 2020 margins by significant percentage points” across an assortment of different demographics.
Testa urged against placing responsibility for these shifts on a single factor and instead cited inflation, campaign blunders and debates over immigration, abortion rights, racism and sexism as possible explanations for the election’s outcome.
“It’s likely all of these factors, and it’s often very hard to disentangle them,” he said. “It’s a matter of degree.”
Testa closed his presentation by diving deeper into exit polls. Using data from CNN, NBC and The Washington Post, Testa evaluated Harris’s success among women, young voters and college-educated individuals, as well as Trump’s success among Latino men, rural voters and lower income groups.
While many pre-election polls seemed to underestimate the amount of national Trump support, Testa emphasized that “polls are useful even when they’re wrong,” he said. “Polling is hard, particularly with Trump and with these sort of unconventional voters.”
Zárate focused on Latine voters, particularly Latino men and their shift toward Trump. He began by showing how gender and perceptions of the economy influenced the results, clarifying that it was not only the Latino demographic that decided the election.
“We see a lot of people blaming Latino men and Latinos more generally,” Zárate said. “But when we look at a map like this, we can see that it is not just one demographic group, it’s an entire country.”
Zárate previously surveyed Latino populations on issues like U.S.-Mexico border control and high-income tax hikes, asking whether policies would “help or hurt” Latino communities. The study showed that “Latinos do hold different perceptions of what is good for the group,” he said.
He also analyzed the difference in Harris’s and Trump’s approaches to winning over Latine voters. According to Zárate, Harris attempted to appeal to Latine voters via her pro-immigrant policy positions, but many immigrants “want to feel American” — a sentiment Trump used to mobilize Latino men.
Arenberg, who spoke last, discussed the significance of Republican control over Congress, emphasizing the Senate’s role in confirming presidential appointments to the cabinet, the Supreme Court and other prominent positions.
As Republicans won control of the Senate on Tuesday, “Trump will — particularly given the control he has over his own party — be able to put whoever he wants in the cabinet,” Arenberg said.
He also noted the possibility that Trump appoints younger conservative justices to the Supreme Court if Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas retire.
“Right now, we have the preconditions for establishing a very conservative Supreme Court of the United States for decades to come,” Arenberg said. “We’re basically already there.”
Arenberg believes that Democrats will have to rely on the filibuster as their “last, best hope to have leverage, in terms of Trump’s political legislative agenda.”
Schiller expanded on this point, saying that “Trump will want the Republican leadership — whoever that’s going to be — to get rid of the filibuster” so Democrats no longer have the “opportunity to complain about Trump on the Senate floor.”
But while many students at Brown reacted to the election results with dread and fear, Schiller explained that Trump’s victory in both the popular vote and the electoral college “gives people who voted for Donald Trump a sense that the system does work.”
In 2020, “70 million-plus people were told that elections were rigged and fraudulent and not legitimate,” Schiller said. “Now their team won … That may restore some, not all, of the belief in elections.”
Jack Scandling ’28 described the panel as “very fair.”
“I thought they provided good insight,” he said. “It was nonpartisan and fair across the board.”
Malcolm Furman ’27 said that “the panel was informed by certain trends and patterns that were illuminated by the results of the election, and that Democrats in particular have a lot to think about moving forward after a night that did not favor them.”
According to Schiller, one of the panel’s aims was to turn anxiety into productive dialogue about the results’ key takeaways.
“What are the components that led to the victory? What do we learn from this victory in terms of politics? How do the Democrats have to reset?” Schiller said.
“Having witnessed a lot of elections,” Schiller believes “it is most productive to think, ‘Okay, what do I do next?’”
