AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Abstract: The lead up to the 2026 and 2028 elections includes soaring gas prices, America at war, and immigration agents strategically deployed to airports around the country. How might these developments shape the way voters think about their choices in these elections? I will use 82 weeks of data from July 2019 to February 2021, more than 500,000 respondents, a 2026 follow-up survey, and a conjoint experiment with more than 5 million profile evaluations to show that although public opinion is often responsive at the level of attitudes, its dominant feature is stability. Moreover, the underlying structure of political priorities is locked in — and very little over the last seven years has changed it. The electorate moves, but it mainly moves within a relatively calcified hierarchy of concerns.
Lynn Vavreck is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a contributor to The New York Times. She is a recipient of the Andrew F. Carnegie Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the author of six books, including The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Election & the Challenge to American Democracy. Her 2016 book, Identity Crisis, was named the “most ominous” book of 2018 by the Washington Post Book Review, and Nate Silver dubbed her 2012 election book the “definitive account” of that election. From 2019-2021, she helped develop and manage Nationscape, a 500,000-interview election survey, and from 2020-2022 she ran the UCLA Covid-19 Health and Politics Project, a collaboration between medical doctors and social scientists at UCLA and Harvard. At UCLA she teaches courses on campaigns, elections, public opinion, and the 1960s. Professor Vavreck holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester and held previous appointments at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and The White House. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she remains a loyal Browns fan and is a “known equestrian” – to draw on a phrase from the 2012 presidential campaign.
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