Perspectives from Drew faculty and staff experts
November 2024 – With the charged 2024 Presidential Election fast approaching, Drew University faculty and staff have weighed in to provide perspectives and insights from their areas of expertise.
Sangay Mishra, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations
What is your perspective of this election?
This is turning out to be one of the most closely contested elections if we trust the polls that have been coming in. People are extraordinarily anxious about the outcome. A greater level of anxiety points to a deep polarization among the electorate. It also points to a sense among people that stakes are greater than in a typical election. A large number of people feel that democracy itself is at stake. There are deep concerns about abortion and reproductive rights. This election is being seen as a turning point on that count. On the other side, a deep sense of losing control of the country and a heightened threat about immigration is taking hold among a section of the electorate. With these issues undergirding a deeply polarizing election, a section of youth is also deeply disenchanted with the lack of a clear choice in the electoral arena on the issue of the ongoing war in Gaza.
As a scholar of immigration, I am deeply worried about the fact that the discussions on immigration in this election are reminiscent of the 1920’s United States when infamous restrictive quotas on Southern and Eastern Europeans immigrants were introduced and the language of eugenics was used to vilify immigrant communities.
What would you say to people on either side of the aisle who are concerned about the outcome and/or integrity of the outcome?
It is important to keep in mind that unlike most other advanced democracies using nationalized elections with uniform procedures, elections in the United States are administered at the local level, meaning thousands of different electoral jurisdictions must conduct simultaneous elections for president ending on a single day. That makes it harder for disputes to get resolved in a quick and efficient manner. This is an area where a lot can be done to standardize the procedure to the extent possible, but it is a highly contentious issue. We should also remember that election process has been a site of intense dispute in American politics for a long time whether it is voter ID laws, gerrymandering, changes in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the more recent dispute around postal ballots. And now we are in a period where intense polarization has led to wholesale questioning of the voting system that led to the violence on January 6, 2021, aimed at overturning the election results. One of the major demands that has become quite common in the last few years is to ensure that election workers and their families are not facing threat of violence and retaliation while performing their duties. I feel that the United States electoral system, having worked for the most part, is in an uncharted territory in this era of intense political polarization.
