The 2000 American Presidential Election

Abstract

The 2000 Presidential election was one of the longest, most expensive and closest in American history. It was the Presidential election that exposed the flaws (or genius) of the electoral college system, demonstrated the imperfections of media dependency on exit polls and quick election calling, and showed how a third party candidate with just two percent of the popular vote could make the difference in the crucial state of Florida. Democrats lost states they should have won; Republicans lost every big city and most of their suburbs; and the Florida election came down to a five-to-four muddled decision by the Supreme Court. Americans collectively learned a great civics lesson: that even in a bitter, controversial contest, our candidates accept defeat graciously; the simple act of voting is not so simple; and that for all its shortcomings, the electoral college did work.     

Race,Partisanship, and Political Trust Following <Emphasis Type="Italic">Bush versus Gore</Emphasis> (2000)

In contrast to what we know about the sources of political trust among whites, recent research suggests that political mistrust among blacks indicates discontent with the political system. The current study adds to research investigating racial differences in political trust by examining racial differences in the influence of the 2000 United States presidential election on political trust. Specifically, I test for whether whites and blacks adjusted their trust in government in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush versus Gore (2000) and whether the influence of the Court’s decision on trust was dependent on partisan identification. The findings indicate that blacks perceived the Court’s decision as illegitimate, reinforcing their mistrust in their political system.

Evangelical Protestantism and foreign policy in the United States after September 11

Much that has been written on evangelicals in the United States concerns their impact on domestic politics. But the election of George W. Bush has resulted in a new importance for the relationship between evangelicals and US foreign policy. This has become particularly clear following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Three issues deserve further study. One is evangelicals’ attitude to Islam. The second involves the relationship between evangelicals and Israel. The third concerns the stance of evangelicals towards war with Iraq. Through an examination of these three issues, Durham explores a number of important ­questions, ranging from the relationship of evangelicals’ theology and their politics to their partly supportive, partly critical attitude towards an administration itself led by an evangelical. Many evangelicals see the ‘war against terror’ as a war against Islam and unreservedly approve of Israeli policy, and many supported the launch of war in Iraq. Yet evangelicalism is not a monolith and, with regard to its disputes over how to respond to the ‘threat’ of Islam or what view to take of the Israel–Palestine conflict, Durham offers new insights into a powerful voting bloc and source of pressure within US politics.     

Taking ‘Big Government Conservatism’ Seriously? The Bush Presidency Reconsidered

This article reflects on the ongoing debate about the ideological direction of the Bush presidency and what it means for the future of US conservatism in domestic policy. The paper considers the dual nature of US conservatism and then goes on to explore the 'conservative promise' of the 2000 presidential election and the debate over what critiques of the Bush administration have come to call 'big government conservatism'. Finally, the article studies two examples of how this alleged 'big government conservatism' has been manifested. First, the article contemplates the administration's fiscal policy. Second it looks at the 2003 reform of the Medicare system. We argue that, although these two cases provide some ground to the idea of 'big government conservatism', in the end this phenomenon does not add up to a coherent policy vision. Overall, beyond tax cuts, the Bush administration has failed to implement a bold conservative agenda.     

The Love That Dare Not Speak its Name? George W. Bush: State and Nation Building in Afghanistan, 2001–2

George W. Bush was an unlikely statebuilder. This controversial activity—one that he and many others persistently referred to as ‘nation building’—held little appeal for America's 43rd president. He did, however, learn to appreciate Charles Krauthammer's axiom that ‘no sane person opposes nation building in places that count’. This article posits that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, a more nuanced reading of the evidence shows that Bush rapidly and fairly consistently adopted something that resembled statebuilding, even if he was reluctant to acknowledge this in public. Bush's early decisions in Afghanistan merit a second look, not least because they pivot on a U-turn that established the foundations for a lengthy broad spectrum commitment that would last more than ten years.     

Rallying Votes? A Multilevel Approach to Understanding Voter Decision-Making in the 2016 Presidential Nominating Contests

The 2016 presidential nominating process presented the American public with an interesting and tumultuous set of contests. Despite the unique nature of both the Democratic and Republican contests, the candidates stuck to the usual campaign activities to help influence voters. However, one of these campaign tactics, campaign visits, has been vastly understudied. Using a uniquely compiled dataset and a hierarchical linear model, I am able to test how campaign effects, including visits, as well as an individual’s predispositions impacted vote choice in the 2016 presidential nominating contests. The results demonstrate that the 2016 presidential nominating contests were decided based on a combination of both campaign activities and individual-level predictors.     

Shirley Chisholm： Unbought and unbossed An African American woman in U.S. politics

The article explores how an African American woman, Shirley Chisholm, was involved in American politics in the 20th century. Chisholm＇s political career took off in 1964, when she won the campaign for the New York State General Assembly. In 1968, after finishing her term in the legislature, Ms. Chisholm campaigned to represent New York＇s twelfth congressional district. She won the election and became the first colored woman elected to congress. During her first term in congress, Chisholm hired an all-female staff and spoke out for civil rights, women＇s rights, the poor and against the Vietnam War. In 1970, she was elected to continue a second term. She remarked that women in the United States must become revolutionaries and they must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles and stereotypes. On January 25, 1972, Shirley Chisholm announced her candidacy for president. Ms. Chisholm became the first African American woman to campaign for the presidency. Not surprisingly, she met a lot of resistance, even from the congressional black caucus and women＇s right groups. The Democratic National Convention in 1972 in Miami was the first major convention in which a woman was considered for the presidential nomination. Although she did not win the nomination, she received 151 of the delegates＇ votes. The whole aim of her campaign was not to win but enter the struggle and pave the way for the future. Ms. Chisholm believed her black colleagues in congress failed to rally around her because she was a woman. Shirley is one of the many African American women who have been denied their rightful place in American history, She fought for change and the article tries to remember the role she played in the United States politics in the 20th century.     

The French elections of 2017: shaking the disease?

The results of the 2017 presidential and legislative elections represent an important shift in French politics. For the first time in the history of the 5th French Republic, the candidates of the two traditional governing parties were disqualified during the first round of the presidential elections. The duel between a centrist and a radical-right candidate in the second round of the elections constitutes an unprecedented configuration. Moreover, there was a record parliamentary renewal after the 2017 legislative elections, as well as a feminisation of the National Assembly with 38.8 per cent of women among the deputies. At the same time, abstention for the legislative elections reached a new record high. Overall, the results of the French elections in 2017 could point to major shifts in the party system, as well as to a renewal of the French political elite, and to an enduring malaise between French citizens and their political representatives.     

Issue Convergence in Presidential Campaigns

This effort seeks to expand our understanding of the supply-side of the campaign process by investigating how candidate competition for agenda control affects occurrences of issue convergence (the discussion of the same issues by competing candidates) in campaigns for the presidency. More specifically, I integrate hypotheses suggested by extant literature into a framework that captures the factors that motivate presidential candidates selection of issues and the factors that affect their decisions to address issues also discussed by their opponents. These hypotheses are tested with duration analysis and data gathered from all available campaign advertisements produced by candidates competing in the 1976 through 1996 presidential elections. The results indicate that occurrences of issue convergences are quite frequent in presidential campaigns and that candidates decisions to address the same issues are affected by an issues saliency and partisan ownership, as well by changes in the campaign environment.     

Budget Rhetoric in Presidential Campaigns from 1952 to 2000

We offer a theory to identify the determinants of presidential campaign rhetoric related to the federal budget. The theory builds on the literature dealing with issue ownership, candidate strategy, retrospective voting, and voter preferences to generate eight hypotheses about the use of budget rhetoric. To test these hypotheses, over 800 campaign speeches from the major party presidential nominees from 1952 to 2000 are content analyzed. The content analysis generates measures of both the volume and tone of budget rhetoric. Volume is driven primarily by the objective balance of the budget and subjective importance given to it by voters and a conditional effect involving budget balance, incumbency, and partisanship. Tone is more complex, with positive rhetoric determined mostly by the budget balance and partisanship and overstated rhetoric shaped solely by the salience of the budget to the electorate. The article concludes with suggestions for future research.     

Schism on the Left: the Motivations and Impact of Ralph Nader's Candidacy

In the United States there is noticeably less controversy over the third party candidacy of Ralph Nader in this year's election than there has been in the previous two. Nader was blamed by many on the left for the Democratic Party's loss of the 2000 election. He has further provoked the ire of the Democrats by claiming that there is no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. This article will focus on addressing several of the emergent questions from the Nader candidacies, namely: is there a difference between the two parties in the United States? Did Ralph Nader cost the Democrats the election in 2000? Are citizens better off voting for the ideal candidate or settling for the best candidate who has a chance of victory?     

Going Negative

SUMMARY

In this paper we explore the relationship between candidate attack messages and news coverage during the earliest stages of the presidential nomination process. How effective are attack messages in generating media coverage? Are certain types of negative content more likely to gain coverage? Using data from the 1996 Republican presidential nomination campaign, we examine the candidate press releases that issued an attack on an opponent and the subsequent news coverage linked to it. We find that while candidates are more than willing to go negative even during the early stages of the campaign, these negative messages are no more or no less likely to generate press coverage during the early months of the presidential nomination campaign than are other types of candidate messages.     

Black and White Unite? The Clinton–Obama Campaigns in Historical Perspective*

Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are battling to win the Democratic party's nomination as presidential candidate in 2008. Never has a white woman or a black man been so close to entering the White House. Standing in their way is Republican Senator John McCain, who would be the oldest white male ever to become US president. A possible spoiler for any of the three is the perennial campaigner, Ralph Nader. The political, social and economic histories of women and African Americans have been entwined, often to the cost of the other, since before the American Civil War. Before World War I the issue was the suffrage; then came the struggles for (women's) equal rights and (African American) civil rights, particularly after World War II. These narratives, with the related cross‐currents of class and ethnicity, are explored in relation to contemporary history and politics, especially the continuing gender and racial ‘gaps’ in US society.     

Barack Obama and the South: demography as electoral opportunity

ABSTRACT

Barack Obama was more successful in the South in the 2008 election than many previous Democratic presidential nominees had been. While John McCain continued Republican dominance in the conservative region, it was a major breakthrough for a northern liberal Democrat, especially an African American from Illinois, to win three southern states and secure 55 electoral votes. Florida, North Carolina and Virginia were good opportunities for Obama because, demographically, they had come to resemble other large states outside the South. In these ‘converging’ southern states, the Latino and Asian communities had grown substantially. The percentage of college-educated Whites had increased and there had been large-scale migration from other regions of the country. The states that Obama won in the South were not as ‘southern’ as they once were. In some southern states, those called the ‘neo-Confederate South’ in this article, white support for Obama was less than John Kerry had received in 2004. This decline in white voting for the Democratic presidential nominee occurred despite the difficult economic times that enveloped the country in the months preceding the election, and the general unpopularity of the incumbent Republican administration headed by George W. Bush. Some of these states, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, had been among the most intransigent states in resisting the claims of the civil rights movement for social and political equality for African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. In the future it may be more accurate to speak of more than one South, rather than refer to the region as an undifferentiated whole.     

The Political Origins of the Financial Crisis: The Domestic and International Politics of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

For much of the last decade it was clear that the commercial operations of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were creating an increasing systemic financial risk. That risk was compounded by the fact that the Japanese and Chinese central banks were acting as cheap creditors. The Bush administration and some Republicans in Congress made efforts from 2001 to create a tougher regulatory framework for Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie were able to defeat these attempts to constrain their operations by a four-fold political strategy involving campaign contributions to members of Congress, a vast lobbying apparatus, the cultivation of a political language around affordable housing for minorities, and abusing and smearing their regulator. Since Japan and China understood that the US government would have to assume Fannie and Freddie's liabilities in a crisis they had no incentive to expose the political fiction that it would not.