This season of the Omnia podcast from Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences examines the state of U.S. democracy as it analyzes the recent presidential election. Episodes 4 through 6 examine voting laws, conduct a post-election analysis, and address the future of democracy.
Episode 4, “The Gears of Democracy,” features political science professor Marc Meredith in conversation with Stephanie Perry, executive director of the Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES) and the Fox Leadership Program about why voting laws are so complicated, what has changed since the last election, voter turnout, mail-in ballots, poll workers, and why some races take longer to call than others.
“Federalism is the idea that we have two sovereign governments in the United States. We have the federal governments and the state governments, and we have this weird, strange system of overlapping and shared and distinct powers that sometimes in political science, we call it layer cake federalism, where the same or the federal and state governments, they’re kind of doing the same thing and trying to check each other’s power in some ways. And voting is one of the clear examples of why this can lead to so much complication,” Meredith explains. “We have the Constitution that says that states have the ability to structure their own elections, but give Congress the power to structure the time, place, and manner. We can talk for a whole podcast about what constitutes the time, place, and manner of elections. And so then Congress comes in and passes a bunch of federal regulation that go on top of the state laws. And all of a sudden you have this really messy system where some elements of voting are set by Congress, other parts are set by state governments.”
Episode 5 is a “Post-Election Analysis.” John Lapinski, Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Political Science, director of PORES and director of Elections at NBC News, discusses how the polls measured up to election night results, exit polling results—which showed the economy as the most important factor for many voters—and how polling can continue to improve in future election cycles.
“One of the interesting things is the exit poll is a little bit unlike other polls and that we’re actually talking to real voters. When you do a poll, you’re calling up people and asking if they voted. You can actually in some instances, cross-verify that to see with people who’ve said they voted early. You can actually check the voter file and see if that’s true,” says Lapinski. “I think our exit poll did a particularly [good] job in getting the Latino numbers right. ... The lessons out of 2024 will be for Democrats, is that they’re going to need to rethink some things. And so they’re going to need to rethink about how they’re approaching Latinos.”
And Episode 6, “The Future of Democracy,” features Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science. Perry and Smith discuss the implications of Trump’s second term as president, as well as what the future of democracy may look like in the United States.
“It very much remains to be seen whether Trump will take all the actions that he promised on the campaign trail. Some of them, I think, risk ratcheting up the volatility of American politics and the potential for lawless violence in very concerning ways,” says Smith. “In particular, the plan for rapid mass deportation of millions of immigrants, it’s going to be logistically hard to do. He’s planning to deploy the U.S. military to do it. It is going to encounter resistance for many state and local officials, and there will probably be groups of immigrant supporters that engage in forcible resistance. And if the media performs as it has in the past, it will publicize, sensationalize all these conflicts rather than lower the temperature on them. So I am concerned that if these plans go forward as the rhetoric has presented them, we could find ourselves in very turbulent times in the very near future.”
Listen to the podcasts in full at Omnia.
