Experts in the News | Miller Center

Watch The Democratic Debates Like An Expert & Look Out For These 3 Moments

Jennifer Lawless, a politics professor at the University of Virginia and the former director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University, tells Bustle that race, gender, and identity will be front and center again this week, in part because of the president's rhetoric since the first pair of debates. On July 14, Trump tweeted that minority women in Congress should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Then, on July 17, Trump attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at a North Carolina rally, with his supporters chanting, "Send her back!"

Jennifer Lawless

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump Are Peak White Male Privilege

“For decades, Biden’s schtick has sort of been he says whatever he wants and then says he’s just a straight talker,” said Jennifer Lawless, a politics professor at the University of Virginia. People just shrug it off as Joe being Joe.

Jennifer Lawless

2020 election is a test America can't afford to fail

If after four years, the American system re-elects a president who openly scoffs at democracy, who encourages political violence and election interference, who revels in corruption and ignorance, then something is deeply wrong with either our system or ourselves.

Nicole Hemmer

The GOP’s questions to Mueller seemed bizarre — unless you watch Fox News

When Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) had his turn to quiz former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during a hearing Wednesday morning, he came armed with what he seemed to think was a smoking gun: that neither Glenn Simpson nor Fusion GPS were mentioned in the Mueller report. Most Americans no doubt shared Mueller’s apparent confusion about the line of questioning: He said he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, a private strategic intelligence firm, and that Simpson, the organization’s founder, was outside the scope of his investigation. Yet as the hearings wore on, Republican lawmakers returned again and again to Simpson and Fusion GPS, treating them like household names. And for conservatives on a steady diet of right-wing media, they are: the linchpins of a conspiratorial witch hunt to impeach President Trump.

Nicole Hemmer

Kamala Harris isn’t ‘electable’? It could be code for not being a white man

Ideas about which Democrat is electable have to do “with Donald Trump and the campaign he ran in 2016” against Hillary Clinton, said Jennifer Lawless, a University of Virginia political science professor who has studied the concept of gender bias in politics.

Jennifer Lawless

Trump supporters’ newest rallying cry—‘Send her back!’—reverberates across a nation fraught with racial tension

Trump has long rejected the traditional presidential role of a unifying figure for America’s broad and diverse population, and his decision to spread such inflammatory rhetoric was bound to escalate beyond his control, said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Russell Riley