Q & A with Stephon Boatwright, assistant professor of political science and international relations at St. Michael’s College
Caleb Nelson | News & Sports Editor | cnelson3@mail.smcvt.edu
The interview below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What is your initial reaction to Trump’s huge victory ?
The results are pretty shocking! Mostly on account of the polling averages being so far off the mark once again in the Northern Midwest.
Also, there appears to be historic shifts towards the GOP in some key demographics such as the youth and Hispanic men.
It’s early so we’ll have to see. However, based on the state and vote counts there appears to be a sizeable shift towards Trump in the vast majority of counties since 2020.
Democratics will have a lot of soul searching to figure out what went wrong on messaging, and grappling with the nation’s willingness to elect Trump when even a majority of those who voted appear to have a negative opinion of him.
With a majority in the Senate it is certainly possible that some of Trump’s bigger policy initiatives may have legislative support.
What does Trump mean for democracy going forward?
I think a Trump presidency means that there are going to be very big challenges to the institutions of government the way that we understand them.
He definitely has some more esoteric reading of the economics, of the institutional law, of executive authority, so I would guess those boundaries would be tested over four years in office.
Probably some unusual topics too, like the use of the military, or if he is sincere in his efforts to deport up to 20 million folks who he thinks are in this country illegally.
If that’s the case then undoubtedly we would see a plethora of legal challenges based on any way he would seek to do that.
I think there are going to be a lot of legal battles. I think it’s probably true for either candidate, but it is probably an elevated risk knowing Donald Trump’s unusual reading of some aspects of our government.
What strategies might Republicans try to use to shore up votes in the future?
Historically the number one indicator of how someone votes in the U.S. – whether it’s for better or for worse – is your race.
You can tell a good amount about a voter by their education. After that then the variables get a little muddled.
So historically you would say if the Republican party is going to expand its base or something like that, and this is still true, it needs to win in voters of color in much larger numbers than are currently in the party.
You are starting to see a strong shift I think in that direction. But it’s happening in a kind of unusual way. It seems to be predominantly men of color who are maybe a bit more attracted to Donald Trump this time around.
And the educational divide is still there too. Typically men without a formal college education, and so with all these things kind of shifting and happening right now it’s kind of difficult to say how the GOP maintains its political bite so to speak.
But it needs voters of color. It needs to try to bring in more women because the gender gap is widening and women overwhelmingly more than the Democrats.
What role does gerrymandering play?
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing congregational districts in a way that shuts out one party in favor of the other.
If you really just don’t care about the other side having any real political say in the state you can maybe squeeze whatever the political minority is down to a seat or two in a state that has dozens of congregational districts.
So in practice, it will look something like Maryland. If they were winning congregational seats proportionately, [Republicans] should have about a third of the seats because Maryland consistently votes Republican.
Democrats have managed to actually draw the line in such a way that even though a third of the state votes Republican, Republicans only have one congregational seat in an otherwise pretty populated state.
More often than the example I just gave though – and the reason I get asked anything about gerrymandering – is because it typically happens the other way around.
Republicans have been very efficient at doing some really extensive gerrymandering in states like Wisconsin, and North Carolina, where you have Democratic majorities.
Most of the people in Wisconsin voted for Democrats, but you still ended up with Republican majorities and state houses and Congress.
For that reason, Democrats have been fighting for quite some time to try and tip the balance of the scales back in their favor with some mixed results but I think gerrymandering is a little bit less extreme now.
Is the current electoral system fit for purpose in the 21st century?
I think there is a lot of sense among some folks anyway that they are getting fed up with it.
So right now there is an interstate compact where some states are looking to circumvent it, meaning they would give all of their electoral votes to whoever won the popular vote which otherwise is kind of meaningless politically speaking.
If you get enough states to sign up, and you can get to 270 votes between those states, then hey, you’ve just killed the Electoral College through the back door.
I don’t see a constitutional event getting rid of it, so we would probably look to something like that if anything was ever to change with it.
But there are also some other possibilities I think folks may look into as time goes on. There may be more states that end up looking like Maine or Nebraska that chop up their electoral votes.