As Election 2020 races toward the finish line, Bowdoin faculty are showing up in force in national media outlets eager for their insight.
Professor of Government Michael Franz, who teaches the course Campaigns and Elections and whose areas of scholarship include campaign advertising, is quoted in the Washington Post Magazine piece, “The Heartland Whisperer.”
“Democrats have that angle that they get to sell: ‘Here’s what we need to do to fight back. Here are the things we should try to accomplish.’ Republicans’ current main agendas, smaller government, lower taxes, law and order,” Franz says in the article, “are harder to sell in an aspirational way. They’re easier to sell in a ‘You should be afraid of X, Y or Z.’” Read “The Heartland Whisperer.”
Relatedly, Franz also was featured on the local NBC affiliate’s newsmagazine show, 207, talking about how about $125 million has been spent on the race for the US Senate in Maine, a contest of national interest. Watch “How Maine’s US Senate contest turned into a financial arms race.”
Sharing her insight in Roll Call, Professor of Government Janet Martin weighs in on that same race, saying that in the past, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) “received mostly positive coverage in the national press. This year that’s changed.” Read “Two GOP senators’ strategies diverge, but both are in peril.”
Assistant Professor of Government Chryl Laird, author of Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020), was tapped by NBC News for a piece about Black voters over the age of 65.
"Black older voters are truly the stronghold the Democratic Party has in terms of consistency, reliability and turnout," says Chryl Laird. Read “‘A stronghold of the Democratic Party’: How older Black voters could propel Biden to victory.”
A Washington Post piece that examines President Trump’s use of executive power, went to Andrew Rudalevige, Bowdoin’s Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government, for his expertise on the subject. Read “How Trump learned to embrace the executive order, which he once called an ‘easy way out.’”
Days later, the Post quoted Rudalevige again in the article, "Last stand of the Republican moderate," a look at the final week of Sen. Collins's campaign.
