DENNIS SHARKEY/Citizen photos
Park University political science professor Dr. Jack Adam MacLennan (above) and Dr. Matt Harris (below) spoke about the 2020 election the day after on Wednesday, Nov. 4.
A pair of Park University political science professors attempted to tackle the questions of what happened and how it happened concerning the 2020 presidential election.
Dr. Matt Harris and Dr. Jack Adam MacLennan sat down at the university’s David Theater (Alumni Hall) the day after on Wednesday, Nov. 4. The event was live streamed and the pair answered questions from folks on Twitter. The event was moderated by Erik Bergrud, associate vice president for university engagement.
The conversation started out talking about what a Biden presidency means for domestic and foreign policy and how other countries will handle dealings with the United States. MacLennan said many nations have had a wait-and-see approach up until the election.
“They’ve tried to keep open the potential for moving forward on agenda items that were being worked on before the election,” MacLennan said.
MacLennan said don’t expect much to change with relationships with larger adversaries like China and Russia and to look for nations like Iran to try and strike deals. However don’t expect anything to get done.
“A divided government means we’re unlikely to see a president be able to enshrine into law various agreements,” MacLennan said.
MacLennan said a divided government with Democrats holding the presidency while Republicans control the Senate means getting treaties ratified will still remain difficult just like it has been an issue for some time now. For the past several decades the rest of the world has still done business with the U.S. based on norms that have always existed. MacLennan said the election results will have other nations apprehensive about making deals.
I think (Biden) is going to have a far more difficult time because he wasn’t morally embraced,” MacLennan said. “This wasn’t a wholesale rejection of Trump’s domestic or foreign agenda.”
Up until the election a lot of focus went to polls and their accuracy. Many polls had Biden leading by double digits nationwide but the results were a lot closer. MacLennan said polls are not broken but are snapshots in time and should be viewed as such; not as a predictor of the final outcome.
“People change their minds, people alter their vote, people decide to vote or not vote. All of these things matter and they can matter right down to the moment people vote,” MacLennan said.
MacLennan said when viewed in the aggregate polls are pretty close to accurate. He said pollsters throughout the process have always made it clear there is a possibility Trump could win.
“Unlikely doesn’t mean it can’t happen or that it’s more difficult to happen than anything else,” MacLennan said.
MacLennan said in 2016 pollsters did a bad job of “framing” or explaining how polls work. He said in other countries and in the U.S. during midterm elections polls are pretty accurate in predicting the final outcome.
“I hesitate to make the bald-faced argument that polls are completely broken and you should ignore them completely,” MacLennan said.
Harris said pollsters really are not that noticeable until they’re wrong.
“Pollsters are like weathermen in the sense that when they get it right nobody cares,” Harris said. “We don’t recognize when they’re good but we do when they’re off.”
Harris said in 2016 most of the polling was done before Hillary Clinton took a dive late in the campaign which was not reflective. He said this year’s polls had a cushion built in.
“What those polls told us is that Biden could suffer a pretty significant polling error and still win which looks like what happened,” Harris said.
The pair also addressed the disconnect between voters and the issues they support. Harris said when Trump supporters are asked if they support ObamaCare, it polls negatively; but when voters are asked if preexisting conditions and other protections in ObamaCare should exist, they’re supportive. MacLennan said just like polls, politicians also have framing problems.
“It’s not always that people don’t have a sufficient understanding of what they’re voting on it’s that they’re moved to vote on things by the way they’re framed,” MacLennan said. “The way it’s framed, they will vote against it. I think that’s a really unfortunate thing.”
Harris said it also comes down to partisanship and a sense of being on a team. He used the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh as a prime example.
“The treatment of Bret Kavanaugh was not really all that policy-oriented but something that does speak to voters in this kind of team politics of us against them,” Harris said.
The Citizen followed up with Harris after the forum to take a closer look at the trends in Missouri. Harris said he studied the data after former Missouri U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill lost her re-election bid to Sen. Josh Hawley, while several issues that would be considered progressive like medical marijuana, a hike in the minimum wage and the defeat of a right-to-work law that was passed by Republicans in the legislature earlier that year.
Harris said the answer really isn’t difficult to figure out when looking at exit polling. Even though voters supported those issues they weren’t fundamental in the decision-making process when it came time to vote for a person.
“One of the issues correlating with support for (McCaskill’s) opponent was support for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh,” Harris said. “If we look at exit polling data we can see how Trump and Biden supporters viewed different issues as being the most important - for Trump backers it was the economy, and for Biden backers it was health care.”
As mentioned before Harris said partisan divide is the biggest reason someone votes in the manner they do. Harris said many times voters don’t know what issues candidates do stand for or what positions they take.
“President Trump has professed to be in favor of a kind of economic populism that hasn’t really materialized in his actions,” Harris gave as an example. “Would a progressive candidate do better in Missouri than a moderate like Claire McCaskill? I don’t think we have evidence for that, and if we look at the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders lost every single county in Missouri to Joe Biden.”
Voters in 2018 overwhelmingly voted in favor of the Clean Missouri Amendment that dropped the amount of gifts lobbyists could give to $5 and dropped the campaign donation limitation amounts. It also changed the way district maps were to be drawn to take partisanship out of the process. With the overturning of Clean Missouri in the 2020 election most experts say the process will go back to the way it was before with judges eventually being the ones to draw the maps.
Harris said there are two things at play in why Amendment 3 slipped by with 51 percent vote. In 2018, roughly 2.4 million people voted in the election. In 2020, more than 3 million voted in Missouri. However, Harris believes the wording of the amendment had more to do with the outcome. Amendment 3 banned lobbyist gifts when it was already at $5.
After the passage of Clean Missouri Republicans complained about the changes. Great Northwest Days, a day where elected officials from cities and counties along with business leaders visit Jefferson City to lobby, was said to be in jeopardy because lawmakers would not be allowed to attend the banquet.
Republicans also complained that Clean Missouri confused voters and that they didn’t really know what they were voting on.
“There was some window dressing in the amendment that potentially swayed votes more than the meat and potatoes about redistricting,” Harris said. “Ultimately, votes are only representative of voters’ true preferences if they understand what they’re being asked to vote on. Of course, I don’t have any data at this point to demonstrate that voters didn’t really understand Amendment 3, but I’d imagine something like that was happening to have such a swing in two years.”