In her recent interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, CNN’s Dana Bash asked the Democratic presidential candidate if she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet. Harris carefully answered that she would consider doing so in order to have viewpoint diversity among her agency heads. Not only did she express open-mindedness in this polarized world, but she added a different meaning to diversifying her White House for those who despise DEI based on race, gender, or ethnicity.

Republican Senator J.D. Vance, running for vice president on the GOP ticket, responded that the Trump administration would also consider naming a member of the opposing party to the Cabinet. Robert Kennedy Jr. has been angling for such a spot. 

Presidents from Thomas Jefferson onward have brought in officials from the party that opposed them, but not always into the cabinet. In fact, Trump’s cabinet officials included not one Democrat among them.

By contrast, President Barack Obama named four Republicans as cabinet secretaries during his two terms. He asked Secretary of Defense Bob Gates to remain from the George W. Bush administration to run the Pentagon in the midst of ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama’s third “SecDef,” onboarding at the beginning of his second term, was former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel. For secretary of transportation, the president selected former GOP Congressman Ray LaHood, and he named Proctor and Gamble CEO Robert McDonald, a Republican, as his last secretary of veterans' affairs.

President George W. Bush tapped former Democratic Congressman Norm Mineta to serve as his first secretary of transportation. He faced the crisis of 9/11 head-on, stationing himself in the White House bunker and ordering all airliners to land after terrorists highjacked four civilian planes and turned them into attack missiles.

Mineta told the Miller Center in his oral history that he had always seen transportation issues as nonpartisan. He even quipped, “People would ask me, ‘Did being a Democrat in a Republican administration work to your disadvantage?’ I said no. The fact that I had a D after my name wasn’t as bad as being from California in a sea of Texans!” 

Gates, a Washington pro, excelled in both the Bush and Obama Cabinets during the War on Terror. With less experience in the administrative state and facing headwinds from entrenched White House advisors to President Obama, Hagel found the going more difficult. 

Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s September 4 endorsement of Kamala Harris might earn her a cabinet post as secretary of homeland security, for example. Likewise, her GOP colleague when they served in the House of Representatives and on its January 6th Committee, Adam Kinzinger, would be a credible candidate for secretary of veterans’ affairs in a Harris presidency.

Democratic presidents have tended to appoint more opposing-party members and to more important agencies than their Republican counterparts. The most effective such officials arrive at the West Wing with golden résumés, broad Washington experience, and the president’s full backing against inner-circle skepticism.

Every election season, journalists and pundits can’t get enough of the gender gap. Within just the last few days, CNN ran a headline entitled, “Widest Gender Gap among Gen Z Voters.” Politico’s Playbook went with, “Trump’s Struggle to Close the Gender Gap.” Axios called readers’ attention to a widening gender gap in a new poll. The Hill tracked the gender gap in elections over time, highlighting the fact that it seems to be widening. And CBS News attributed the close race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to, at least in part, a substantial gender gap in vote choice. 

To be sure, the gender gap is a vital component of any presidential election season. Indeed, in every presidential election since 1980, women have been more likely than men to favor the Democratic candidate. So, measuring the gap and analyzing how Democrats can exploit it and Republicans can mitigate it is part of analyzing any campaign. This election cycle, however, the media have taken some mathematical liberties to portray the gap as far larger than it really is.  

Just consider the recent ABC/Ipsos poll indicating that Harris led Trump among women. More specifically, 54% of women expressed support for Harris and 41% favored Trump. The same poll found that, among men, Trump had an advantage: 51% of men supported Trump and 46% of men supported Harris. Several news outlets then calculated a “gender gap” of 18 points. To arrive at this number, they took Harris’ advantage among women (13 points) and added to it Trump’s advantage among men (5 points).

But that’s not what the gender gap is. The gender gap – a phenomenon that political scientists have been studying for decades – is the difference in the percentage of women and the percentage of men voting for a given candidate. In other words, it’s the difference in support Harris receives from women and men, which is 8 percentage points in the ABC/Ipsos poll. This gender gap is similar in magnitude to the 9 point gender gap from 2020, when 55% of women, compared to 46% of men, favored Joe Biden. 

Headlines that proclaim we’ve never seen anything like the 18 point gender gap we’re hearing about this election cycle grab eyeballs. But this flawed math results in an overly simplistic narrative about the dynamics of the election. 

For one thing, we lose sight of the significant differences among women and among men. While 54% of women in the ABC/Ipsos poll favored Harris, fully 41% did not. Women tend to favor the Democrat, but not by overwhelming margins. The same is true of men’s preferences for Trump. Focusing on the gender gap and ignoring these differences within gender categories sets up a “battle of the sexes” frame that doesn’t tell the whole story. 

Artificially inflating the gender gap also minimizes important non-gendered divisions among voters. A mid-August survey conducted by Pew found women to be 5 percentage points more likely than men to support Harris. The same survey uncovered a 13 percentage point gap in support for Harris when comparing college graduates and those with a high school diploma. Similarly, voters under the age of 30 were 13 points more likely to favor Harris than those older than 50. And when it came to race, Black respondents were 36 points more likely than Whites to support Harris, as were Asians (21 points) and Hispanics (11 points). These numbers suggest that, for all of the media attention to the gender gap, differences in vote choice between male and female voters are smaller than they are among many other demographic groups.

Our point is not that the gender gap is meaningless, that campaigns should ignore it, or that journalists shouldn’t cover it. Rather, it’s that we need to calculate it correctly because doing so offers a more accurate portrait of the electorate and its political cleavages. 

If reelected, Donald Trump has promised to revive Schedule F, his plan to convert up to 50,000 career civil servants to political appointee status. Scholars have extensively studied bureaucratic management strategies and the merit system; what does academic research have to say about Schedule F?

I review the literature in a research primer, but, in brief, the research forecast does not look positive.

First, why would Trump and his allies even want Schedule F? Some potential benefits might be increased responsiveness of the bureaucracy to political oversight and improved agency performance from firing poor performers. But the literature is not so optimistic on these points.

Consider the following: 

• Schedule F aims to roll back merit protections, but research shows that merit-based civil service systems are associated with superior bureaucratic performance and less corruption.
• Schedule F would mean that many mid- to high- level career civil servants (including those at the GS-13 to GS-15 level) could be selected on a political basis rather than a merit basis. Research shows that bureaucratic leaders who are chosen on political qualifications tend to be of lower quality.
• Schedule F would increase the number and relative power of political appointees. Here, research shows that this kind of politicization can negatively impact the attitudes, behaviors, and motivation of career civil servants.

Of course, research cannot predict the future, and we do not have a good sense of how Schedule F would be implemented in practice. To get a full understanding of the impact of Schedule F under Trump 2.0, it is worth paying attention to the details as this campaign season unfolds.

Millions of Americans, and most Republicans, believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen even though no court or election officials have verified widespread voter fraud. Donald Trump says that he won the election by a landslide; the official tally had Joe Biden winning by seven million votes. Can there really be millions of illegal votes in the United States that no investigation, no formal review, no court of law can detect?

Maybe we can learn something by looking at an actual case of documented voter fraud.

In 2018, in the 9th congressional district in North Carolina, the victory of the winning candidate was thrown out because of evidence that some of the mail-in ballots in Bladen County had been illegally collected, manipulated, and submitted.  

What are the lessons from the North Carolina case?

First, look for suspicious election results. In the North Carolina precincts involved, there was a longstanding pattern of comparable results for in-person voting and mail-in ballots. That didn’t happen in 2018. The Democratic candidate did very well with in-person voters, while the Republican (a MAGA Trump supporter) did surprisingly well in the mail-in count. That was not proof of fraud, but it was a red flag.

Second, large-scale voter fraud usually involves numerous people engaged in criminal activity and may involve numerous victims. It’s hard to hide. Reporters who knocked on doors in Bladen County quickly found voters who said that they had given their ballot to a nice young person who said they were from the Democratic Party and would turn the ballot in for them. When officials looked at the mail-in envelopes, they found the same two people witnessing multiple voter signatures. That was odd--or it was evidence that a crime had been committed.  

Third, when lots of people are involved in a crime, they often testify against each other. When the envelope witnesses were tracked down and told that they could go to jail for a very long time, they gave up the election consultant who organized the mail-in ballot harvesting and paid his workers on a piecemeal basis for each ballot they collected.

Finally, when information about illegal voting comes out in the press and from an official investigation, there are likely to be consequences. Election officials in North Carolina, following some delay, declared the election tainted. A new election was held, the ballot-harvesting consultant went to jail, and a new Republican candidate in the 9th district won a seat in Congress.

In North Carolina, election fraud was not that hard to prove.

In 2020, could massive election fraud have taken place in multiple districts, in multiple states, without ever being discovered by serious election analysts, ambitious journalists, competent investigators, or responsible election officials? You be the judge.

Much of the information for this blog entry comes from The Vote Collectors by Michael Graff & Nick Ochsner (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
 

Last week, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz conducted a bus tour across two counties in southeastern Georgia. Although the Democratic nominees for president and vice-president also stopped in Savannah, the most notable aspect of the trip lay in its emphasis on the region’s rural areas. Stops included a marching band practice at Liberty County High School, which created a pep rally-style event featuring cheerleaders and the football team. The Democratic ticket also appeared at a barbecue restaurant outside Savannah.

Along with the selection of Walz, who hails from small towns and cities in Nebraska and Minnesota, the bus-tour signaled a key piece of the campaign’s strategy: that it intends to compete for voters in rural parts of the country that since 2000 have trended strongly towards Republican candidates.

The rural-metro divide has deep historical roots. Yet this “geographical sort” has emerged as a defining feature of American politics, to the point that Democrats have become uncompetitive in many rural parts of the United States. Harris and Walz’s mere presence in such areas suggests that they are seeking to complicate this pattern.

The centrality of this strategy is shown not just by the use of the candidates’ precious campaign time in Liberty County, but also by decisions about how to deploy resources: the Harris-Walz campaign has set up twenty-four campaign offices across the state in areas that include both rural and exurban counties. This is more than twice the number established by the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020.

The success of such a strategy does not actually depend on winning deep red counties in states like Georgia. Instead, it requires reducing Donald Trump’s margins of victory in these areas. Even small shifts in voting patterns in one direction or another may be enough to swing such critical states, and hence the election.

Ironically, the Trump campaign had previously pursued an inverse strategy to undermine the geographic sort by reaching out to working class Black and Latino voters, especially men, in urban areas. Polling suggests that Harris’s emergence as the Democratic nominee appears to have undercut this initiative.

A key question that political observers should follow over the next two months is whether the Harris-Walz campaign replicates the Georgia bus tour and the use of campaign staff in rural parts of other battleground states. And even more important is whether such strategies produce tighter margins on election day.

Perhaps the most interesting question, though, will require multiple election cycles to answer: can increased Democratic Party appeals to rural areas and smaller cities erode the rural-metro divide in our politics?
 

With less than three months remaining until Election Day, and with voting beginning next month in several states, the 2024 presidential race has been transformed by President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race and his replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket by Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris’s rapid ascendance and her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate have energized Democratic voters and erased what had been a consistent Republican lead in the polls. Recent national and swing state polls have shown the Harris-Walz ticket running even with or slightly ahead of the Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. JD Vance.

Many things about the 2024 election have been highly unusual, including the withdrawal of the incumbent president under pressure from his own party’s leaders, his replacement by a woman of mixed Black and Indian ancestry, the Republican Party’s nomination of a defeated former president who has been convicted on felony charges, and an attempted assassination attempt against that Republican candidate. Despite these remarkable developments, however, the Time for Change forecasting model should allow us to predict both the popular and the electoral vote with a high degree of accuracy because this election, like all presidential elections, is likely to be decided by a few fundamental forces.

The assumption underlying the Time for Change model, which has an excellent track record in predicting the outcomes of presidential elections since 1992, is that the results of these contests are largely determined by three factors: the popularity of the incumbent president, the state of the economy, and the number of terms that the president’s party has controlled the White House.

Ever since the 2020 presidential election, it seemed clear that so long as the 2024 presidential election was reasonably competitive and reasonably comparable to 2020, the campaign’s focus would be on 7 key swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Industrial North, Georgia and North Carolina in the southeast, and Arizona and Nevada out west. These were the only 7 states that were each decided by 3 points or less in 2020, and President Biden won 6 of the 7 (all but North Carolina) on the way to the presidency. Former President Trump, meanwhile, won 6 of the 7 (all but Nevada) in winning the presidency in 2016.

As Democrats meet in Chicago, the 2024 campaign’s overall focus remains trained on these states—so much so that it’s hard to give an immediate edge to either candidate in any of them. That includes the Tar Heel State, the only truly close state that eluded Biden’s grasp in 2020. We are moving it from Leans Republican to Toss-up.

This is the first time this cycle that we have moved any electoral votes away from the Republican column into the Toss-up column. With this, the number of electoral votes at least leaning to Trump is now 219, down from 235. We previously did this to Democrats earlier in the cycle, when we moved Pennsylvania and then Michigan from their column, reducing their “at least leaning” total from 260 down to the current 226. Beyond the 7 states in the Toss-up category, only a single electoral vote remains in the Leans column—Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which is Leans Democratic. Everything else is in the Likely or Safe columns on either side.

If Vice President Kamala Harris is to maintain her momentum after the convention and attract additional voters to her cause, she will need to lay out a clear vision of what a Harris Administration would stand for and the policies she would pursue. It will be a tricky maneuver, especially if those policies diverge from President Joe Biden’s.

History suggests that an incumbent vice president seeking the White House can be hamstrung by a president who has exited the race. Hubert Humphrey faced that challenge in 1968 after President Lyndon Johnson decided to forego reelection largely because of the ongoing and unpopular Vietnam War. Humphrey needed to distance himself from Johnson on the war, but doing so created friction with the president and proved difficult.

These events have shaped the current conversation about Biden’s withdrawal, but the more instructive episode for the present moment came four years earlier, when Johnson was thrust into the spotlight at a moment’s notice. Johnson’s success at shedding the image of a discounted and frequently maligned vice president and scoring a record-setting presidential election victory illuminates why mapping out a program and a vision that can energize the Democratic base—while also appealing to independents and some Republicans—is so critical.

Vice President Kamala Harris has selected her running mate, and her choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has illustrated some familiar patterns of prudent vice presidential selection even while breaking some new ground. And the pick provides insights into Harris even as it elevates Walz as a new voice on the national stage.

Walz is the first sitting governor to run for vice president on a Democratic ticket in 100 years and the third Minnesotan, following Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter F. Mondale, both of whom were elected to the second office, and the latter who transformed the office. Humphrey and Mondale had been presidential prospects before they became vice presidential candidates and each later ran unsuccessfully for the presidency, whereas Walz apparently disclaimed presidential ambitions during his vetting interviews.

In choosing Walz over Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, both from competitive states that were narrowly-decided and important pieces of the 306 electoral votes Democrats won in 2020, Harris demonstrated yet again that vice presidential selection turns on matters other than the over-hyped criterion of home-state advantage. Walz also had the most experience (17.5 years) in traditional vice presidential feeder positions (senator, governor, member of the House of Representatives, and holder of high federal executive office) of her options, which contrasts with the very limited experience (1.5 years) of his Republican counterpart, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.

President Joe Biden’s decision to step aside as the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee inevitably leads to comparisons with Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the party’s 1968 nomination contest. The analogy is not perfect: Johnson made his announcement in March, not July; he had not yet secured the nomination, although he was the party’s likely candidate; in 1968, the nomination process relied on party officials, rather than delegates chosen by primary voters; Johnson’s withdrawal had little to do with his age, although health may have been a background concern; Johnson’s action also preceded, rather than followed, attacks by assassins on other candidates and leaders.

Finally, open opposition to LBJ’s nomination had emerged within the party, in the form of challenges first by Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and then – following McCarthy’s stronger than expected showing in the New Hampshire primary – by Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. As the brother of the slain president and as Lyndon Johnson’s most bitter rival, Kennedy presented a potentially formidable threat.

Such differences aside, though, Johnson’s 1968 decision is one of only two cases in U.S. history that we have available for comparison (President Harry Truman in 1952 is the other). As such, exploring Johnson’s reasons for leaving the race can help us grasp the gravity of such a decision, as well as the cross-cutting pressures that might motivate a president to end his career voluntarily. The secret White House Recordings provide a rich source of insight into such questions, helping us go beyond easy assumptions that division over Vietnam or fears about his political prospects forced LBJ’s hand.

Q. Does Biden’s endorsement of Harris affect the selection process and Americans’ sense of fairness at this stage of the election process?

A. While Biden’s endorsement propelled Harris’ candidacy to front-runner status, the delegates will make the ultimate decision based on Democratic National Convention rules. Most Americans will believe the process is fair if leaders of the Democratic Party, including Harris and the Democratic National Committee, proceed thoughtfully and clearly communicate the rules and the steps being taken to follow them.

Many party leaders are rallying behind Harris. While this is a critical part of gaining support from DNC delegates, it may amplify calls to ensure that the delegates decide the outcome without undue influence from party elites.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump had agreed to two presidential debates, but, with the incumbent president’s exit from the race (in part, due to a poor showing in last month’s contest), it remains to be seen if Trump will choose to go toe to toe on a stage with the new Democratic standard-bearer.

The first 2024 debate and its preceding history (some of which UVA’s Miller Center has gleaned from its interviews with presidents and their advisors) provide a host of practical preparation and performance lessons that candidates would be wise to adopt in the future.

"Republicans have made it clear that they want to suggest that [Harris is] an illegitimate nominee. Although the law and the paperwork are not on their side — the Democrats have not held their convention yet so Biden was not an actual nominee who's being switched out, this is an actual process, there's an election — they're suggesting that this isn't fair and that it's bait and switch," Lawless told Salon, noting that such attacks are "consistent" with the way the GOP "suggested that Barack Obama was not a legitimate nominee because he wasn't qualified, and that he wasn't a U.S. citizen."

Immediately after President Biden released a letter withdrawing from the presidential race and then followed that up with a separate announcement endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination, an avalanche of endorsements from prominent Democrats and Democratic Party-adjacent groups flooded in. That included several top Democrats who could have been rivals to Harris in a floor fight at the convention, such as Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania (to name just a couple of the many who got in line behind Harris). Donor pocketbooks that had closed on Biden reopened for Harris.

Particularly prior to 2016, there was a popular theory of presidential nominations that even in the primary era, the “Party Decides” who gets nominations through using indirect influences (the theory comes from a book of the same name). In this situation, the party, collectively, pressured Biden to drop out and then, having achieved that, quickly coalesced around Harris.

The nominating decision, formally, is in the hands of a little under 4,000 convention delegates elected during the primary season. Roughly 99% of those delegates were pledged to President Biden. One could argue that the delegates were always free agents because being “pledged” to a candidate does not mean being “bound.” Elaine Kamarck, perhaps the top expert on Democratic delegate rules, noted this late last week, a couple of days before Biden got out of the race: “There is no such thing as Joe Biden releasing his delegates. And Joe Biden gets this. I don't know why the rest of the press doesn't get it. Joe Biden said in his NATO Press conference, he said, quote ‘the delegates can do whatever the hell they want to do’ and that is basically it.” 

President Biden's decision Sunday to step aside from the 2024 presidential race has historic significance on par with Lyndon Johnson's decision to withdraw in 1968 and even George Washington's decision not to run in 1796. The forces behind this weekend's political earthquake have been at work for years, of course—from the deeply divided electorate, the deep antipathy between President Biden and former President Trump, and the grinding force of age. Most importantly, Biden's withdrawal has now pushed forward Kamala Harris as his replacement.

The earthquake began with President Biden's catastrophic debate performance on June 27. It sent shockwaves through Democratic circles, and began to divide the party over whether he was capable of winning the election.

What is most striking about Biden's fall, in retrospect, is how united the party is and has been on his performance as president. His historic legislative accomplishments rival those of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in the sheer number of laws passed, if not in reshaping the goals and missions of the American government. Biden helped manage true national crises — economic, national security, and domestic crises — on par with those inherited by Washington, Roosevelt, and Johnson. That includes a global pandemic, a resulting inflation crisis, the constitutional crisis on January 6th, and Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. On top of developing responses to all of those issues, the Biden team also passed historic bipartisan infrastructure and technology laws, as well as major climate change legislation.

However events unfold, Harris and the Democrats are in uncharted territory, said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection in 1968 — a precedent some have cited in urging Biden to drop out — was announced just over seven months before the general election, setting up a timeline that was languid by comparison.

“There is no direct historical analogy that I’m aware of,” Riley said.

Biden’s decision to exit the race less than a month before his party’s convention and a few months before voters head to the polls is unprecedented in the modern political era. The last sitting president to abandon a re-election bid was Lyndon Johnson, whose expansion of the Vietnam War in the 1960s split the Democratic Party. But Johnson’s announcement came in March 1968 — eight months before that election.

“We’re in uncharted waters,” said Barbara Perry, a presidential studies professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “No president has dropped out or died this close to the convention.”

In ways predictable and not, the 2024 Republican Veepstakes, which produced the selection of Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, was unique. Trump conducted a distinctive process and delayed the choice beyond the normal timeline, a course that fortuitously postponed the choice beyond a pair of unanticipated seismic events: The consequential first presidential debate on June 27 and the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13. Yet these events did not appear to alter the ultimate choice. Trump’s decision reflected some traditional Republican patterns even while producing a choice that was very unusual, both for its lack of outreach and in its elevation of an unusually inexperienced selectee.