Could class play a larger role than race in the future of American politics? Or was last week’s presidential election an aberration — part of a global backlash seeking to punish incumbent leaders for inflation and other economic woes?
According to experts at Harvard Law School, the answer may be a bit of both. And while Republicans are poised to take control of the White House and Congress when President Trump is sworn in for a second term in January, there may be a few glimmers of hope for Democrats as well, members of an election postmortem panel argued yesterday.
For Nicholas Stephanopoulos, the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, the first key takeaway from Nov. 5 is that it didn’t happen in a vacuum. In fact, it was part of an international phenomenon, he said.
“It’s really critical to look at last week’s election in global context, and the relevant global context is that around the world, every single incumbent party worldwide has been losing vote share and seat share in elections held in 2022, 2023, 2024,” he said.
Voters are angry about inflation and economic shocks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stephanopoulos argued. And the ire isn’t exclusive to one group. Compared to 2020, “Most geographies and most groups of voters around the country moved by a relatively uniform amount in Republicans favor.”
“Around the world, every single incumbent party worldwide has been losing vote share and seat share in elections.”
Nicholas Stephanopoulos
There were some interesting exceptions, though — groups that moved more or less toward Trump than average, Stephanopoulos said. For example, “The seven major swing states all swung by quite a bit less than the country as a whole.”
Both presidential campaigns directed huge efforts on those regions, he said, which means that the results in those states could be decent news for Democrats. “I think it tells us that the Harris campaign appears to have outperformed the Trump campaign in the areas the two campaigns focused on.”
The other important exceptions, he said, were the changes seen in urban areas and in minority voters, particularly young people of color and men. “The denser the city, the more the vote moved in the Republican direction last week,” he said. Minorities also moved toward Trump at higher rates than average, resulting in “the most racially depolarized election in about 30 years.”
Stephanopoulos offered one other piece of comfort to those interested in the health of American democracy. Tuesday’s election demonstrated that the House of Representatives is no longer strongly skewed by gerrymandering, or the drawing of district lines to favor one party, he argued.
“For the first time in several decades, there shouldn’t be a built in headwind the Democrats have to compete in the face of,” he said. “Under the current district lines, either party will be able to win a majority of the U.S. House, if that party wins the majority of the U.S. House vote.”
‘Get up and fight’
From Assistant Clinical Professor of Law Ruth Greenwood’s vantage point, there was one bright spot in the aftermath of the presidential election, but the results proved that there was much work ahead for voting rights advocates. And Greenwood, the director of Harvard’s Election Law Clinic, said that she was committed to continuing the fight.
Greenwood began by cheering that administration of the election proceeded smoothly, without widespread problems or violence. Moreover, people have generally accepted the outcome, she continued and, echoing Stephanopoulos’ point, racial polarization in voting has decreased. “These are all things that I care about,” she said.
She admitted that some of the voting reform initiatives she and her clinic have championed fared badly last week. Voters in Ohio rejected a ballot measure to create an independent redistricting commission, for example, while bids to establish ranked choice voting failed in other states, she said. And apart from the election, a lower court in New York struck down the state’s voting rights act, which her clinic had worked on, last Thursday.
Yet, Greenwood insisted she would rise to these new — and existing — challenges. “Am I down now? I am not,” she said, outlining how she would continue the fight for voting rights.
The Ohio initiative “failed because of Orwellian … language,” she said. “So, what can I do about that? I can work on things like ballot language development and keep working to make change.”
The New York case will continue to be litigated, perhaps even up to the U.S. Supreme Court, she said. And with respect to ranked choice voting, Greenwood pledged to continue to work with local communities interested in better representation for all. “It’s really good for communities of color, but it’s also good for any minority communities, ideological minorities. I worked in a community where the Tea Party and NAACP together wanted to get proportional representation, because it would mean both of their groups could get representation.”
She urged members of the audience — particularly law students — not to despair after last week’s election results. “I’m going to keep going. I think that you should keep going,” she said. “This is what we were made for.”
‘Swimming in election law’
The law is critical to the administration of elections — and the president is not, argued Larry Schwartztol, a professor of practice and faculty director of the Democracy and the Rule of Law Clinic.
“Presidential elections are swimming in law,” he said, listing a bevy of federal and state laws that interact to safeguard elections and voters’ rights.
The law Schwartztol was most interested in discussing was the Electoral Count Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2022 to “reduce the risk of electoral subversion in presidential elections, and as a way to prevent a reoccurrence of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Tuesday’s election was the first to proceed under the new law, he noted. “I want to comment on this quiet thing happening in the background that’s going to make zero headlines, because the fact that its first road test, the fact that the first implementation of the statute is happening in an election without a post-election dispute, is, I think, pretty important.”
“The fact that the first implementation of [the Electoral Count Reform Act] is happening in an election without a post-election dispute, is, I think, pretty important.”
Larry Schwartztol
That’s because, Schwartztol continued, an election with little controversy is a good opportunity to “provide institutional actors with experience implementing the framework,” including states, Congress, and election officials.
And what of the president’s power to influence election administration? Schwartztol compared election-related executive orders by Presidents Trump and Biden — which, he added, were “pretty different approaches” — but which nonetheless shared one important similarity: “They both underscore how little the president has to do with the administration of elections.”
‘What does election day mean?’
For Guy-Uriel Charles, the Charles Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law, the election was a chance to ponder an uncertain, but not necessarily negative, future. Charles said that the first issue he will be following involves the counting of absentee ballots.
“What does election day mean?” he asked. “I’m fascinated by cases over receiving late absentee ballots and the revival of the theory of independent state legislature doctrine, meaning, to the extent that county registrars are accepting late absentee ballots, are they changing state law and the legislature’s authority?”
And, given that voters rejected several election reform measures at the ballot box, Charles mused whether “the energy has gone out of that agenda.” Among his questions were: “Where is the impetus? Where’s the support going to come from?”
Charles, the faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, said that he was also interested in the racial politics of the election, and the degree to which “both parties now can claim the mantle of a multiracial electorate.”
“We are in a moment of multiracial transition in American democracy.”
Guy-Uriel Charles
“To what extent is this election telling us …. that class is playing a much stronger role, especially on the Republican side than on the side of Democrats?”
Charles also wondered if the shifting patterns by race and ethnicity were specific to the most recent election — or whether they signaled a more enduring realignment of voters. African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans shifted by different margins, he noted. “It seemed like in the past, we were thinking about voters of color as a broad conception. It’s not clear that that makes sense going into the future.”
What will these changes mean for the structure of the civil rights agenda of tomorrow, Charles asked. Whatever the case may be, he concluded, “We are in a moment of multiracial transition in American democracy.”
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