“It’s an unhappy race in an unhappy country” opened New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens, “each side of the country thinks that if the other half wins, it’s somehow, in one form or the other, the end of America.” A sense of gravity and heightened emotion pervaded the Rackham Graduate auditorium where Stephens joined his colleague at NYT Lydia Polgreen, prominent LatinX journalist María Elena Salinas, and University of Michigan survey researcher Vince Hutchings for a pre-election panel. The discussion was moderated by leading Detroit journalist Stephen Henderson, and hosted jointly by University of Michigan’s Wallace House Center for Journalists and the Ford School of Public Policy.
To understand how much we can really know about the election, panelists focused their attention on the utility of polling. Having built his career around survey research, Professor Hutchings believes strongly in the science behind public opinion polls, but he also recognizes the significance of their limitations: “What we’re currently experiencing in this election cycle is just the difficulty and the inherent imprecision, especially in an evenly divided country, of election forecasting.” Though Hutchings cautioned against predicting any dramatic movements among major social groups, he argued that a slower historical “sorting” has occurred, such that “social divisions in society along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality, for example, have now begun to neatly map onto partisan divisions.” This process partially explains the increased stakes of recent elections, because an electoral victory for one party also means a victory for the groups that constitute it.
Immigration has been a defining issue of the 2024 election cycle, with increased illegal border crossings under the Biden administration continuing to drive heated anti-immigrant rhetoric on the right. María Elena Salinas explained that some Latino men are moving toward Trump despite his dehumanizing remarks because “when they hear these types of insults towards immigrants, they don’t think it’s directed at them - it’s the other immigrants.” Salinas also mentioned the erosion of trust between Latinos and the Democratic party, explaining that when immigration reform fails to materialize again and again, members of the Latino community tend to “blame the people that promised and couldn’t deliver” rather than Republicans, who never made those promises to begin with. Polgreen added that “immigration is almost always a story about the future - about seeking something,” whereas Trumpism has created “this really intense inward, backward looking moment” for America.
Despite the fear and tension swirling around this election, Stephens is optimistic that neither outcome will spell the end of America, as long as democracy itself persists. “There is a history in the United States of arriving at moments of what seem to be intractable politics, deep stagnation, and a great deal of pessimism – and eventually some kind of sunshine breaks through.”