Experts in the News

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The Independent

'Stay calm' v lawsuits: How Biden and Trump are handling finishing the election count

"The geographic sort of metro-rural is changing our politics, and defining the actual nature of our polarization,” says Guian McKee, an associate professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “If we hope to find a better politics in the aftermath of this horrible year of 2020, we must start by understanding the nature of our divisions.”
Guian McKee
AP

Presidential election exposes America's 'perilous' divides

"Except for the Civil War, I don't think we've lived through any time as perilous as this in terms of the divisions," said historian Barbara Perry, the director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.
Barbara Perry
The Hill

Here's why Trump made gains with Florida's Hispanic voters

Despite an extremely tight race and some expectations that Joe Biden would gain ground among Hispanics in Florida (in a similar fashion to Hillary Clinton’s 62 percent Latino support in 2016), the state went to Donald Trump. The state’s large and diverse Hispanic population — estimated at 5.7 million — seems to have played a major role in which way Florida leaned. According to the latest projections, Trump garnered 55 percent of Florida’s Cuban American vote (up an estimated 1 percentage point from 2016), a surprising 30 percent of the state’s Puerto Rican vote, which has tended to lean Democratic, and an estimated 48 percent of Latinos from Central and South America and the Caribbean. This diversity among Florida’s large immigrant communities have made the state fascinating to examine and critical to electoral politics.
Cristina Lopez-Gottardi Chao
UVA Today

What 2020 Election Results Tell Us About America's Growing Urban-Rural Divide

This week’s election, whatever its final outcome, shows how much the red-blue breakdown has now changed, even as polarization has deepened. Rather than North-South and Rocky Mountains-Pacific Coast, our current divide is the product of the great “geographic sort”: the increasing tendency of Americans to live in communities dominated by their fellow partisans.
Guian McKee