Four Dartmouth political scientists answered probing questions on Friday about how, despite predictions of a razor-thin margin in the race for the White House, former President Donald Trump decisively defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, discussing such issues as immigration, foreign policy, and cultural issues.
One of the panelists, Brendan Nyhan, the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Government, said there was “a broad swing” of GOP victories “across geographies and constituent groups.”
Sponsored by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy, the panel discussion was viewed by 200 attendees in Filene Auditorium and via livestream and was moderated by Senior Vice President of Communications Justin Anderson, a former ABC News senior producer, editor, and reporter. Panelists included Nyhan; Jason Barabas ’93, Rockefeller Center director and professor of government; Associate Professor of Government Jennifer Lind; and Anna Mahoney, the Rockefeller Center’s executive director and a lecturer in government.
Nyhan said polls cannot reliably forecast close election results that fall within surveys’ margins of error, and that they can be out of step with current trends. “Most of our quantitative understandings of how people decide who to vote for are from this historic period of stable, low inflation. And so we didn’t maybe understand as well as we do now how much people hate inflation,” he said.
Before tackling hot-button issues that appear to have propelled Trump to victory—among them, immigration, inflation, isolationism, trade tariffs, and culture wars—Mahoney cautioned against reading too much into “what was an unusual campaign to begin with.”
“So we have Donald Trump, who I think everyone can agree is a sort of nontraditional candidate that is not necessarily articulating really coherent policy views and is appealing in different ways,” she said. “But on the other side, we also had the unusual situation where Joe Biden was the nominee for a long time, and then he stepped down. The way the vice president became the candidate was atypical, and she had a shorter period of time to the ballot box.”
Asked to assess the role of misinformation in the outcome, Nyhan said fears about a misleading artificial intelligence blitz on social media turned out to be unfounded. But he sharply disputed Trump’s false claims that immigrants are responsible for a spike in crime. “That kind of misinformation can generate real harms offline,” he said. “And it may be used to legitimize or motivate this mass deportation operation that’s been discussed.”
Turning to foreign policy, Lind predicted Trump would withdraw U.S. support for Ukraine. “That will influence Ukraine’s calculations about should it keep fighting this war and what to accept as peace terms with Russia,” she said.
On NATO policy, Lind believes Trump’s advisers will have a “mix of views” but that he will continue to upbraid NATO members for underpaying their dues. “Europe really is going to be forced to invest more in its own strategic autonomy,” she said.
How much of Trump’s sweeping agenda will be accomplished through legislation will depend on the balance of power in the U.S. House, which, as of Sunday, had not yet been determined but was trending toward the GOP. If Republicans control both chambers, and the Supreme Court remains favorable to the Trump administration, Barabas said, “I think you’d see more legislation than anything before. Some people may like that direction, and some may not.”
During an audience Q&A, the panel fielded questions on a range of issues that divided the electorate. Noting that Trump is “an atypical Republican,” Barabas said his anti-immigration stance could worsen the labor shortage, forcing “some decisions about the business community versus really following through on the mass deportations.”
Similarly, Lind said that Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on foreign goods would be inflationary, “and so to impose that kind of burden on workers doesn’t strike me as a smart move.”
On the future of reproductive rights, Mahoney said, “I think it’s very possible with a unified Republican government that there would be attempts for a federal ban on abortion, although we saw, on Tuesday, several states reaffirming abortion access, even in some unlikely places.”
When a student asked about another battlefront in partisan culture wars, transgender rights, Nyhan said, “Trans folks are a really vulnerable group. It is also the case that it is a wedge issue that is not working to the Democrats’ benefit. I don’t think it’s the reason they lost, but it’s part of a bundle of issues that we’ll be seeing in the data.”
Widening the lens, Kavya Nivarthy ’25, an economics major and vice president of the Dartmouth Political Union, asked the panel how much weight to put on an anti-incumbent effect, not just in the U.S., but worldwide, in recent elections.
“One statistic I saw after the election that really left an impression on me was that this year is the first year since World War II in which every governing party in a developed country lost vote share,” said Nivarthy.
“We are seeing a phenomenon across the developed world of frustration or dissatisfaction with institutions and existing major parties, and that’s created an opening for so-called anti-system parties around the world,” Nyhan answered.
In the U.S., he said, “People express very little trust in a political system. They don’t like government. Donald Trump forced Democrats into being the embodiment of defending the status quo and the institutions that Americans generally dislike.”
Dartmouth’s 2024 Election Speaker Series continues on Tuesday, Nov. 12, with Jeannie Suk Gersen, the John H. Watson Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Keith Whittington, the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School; on Thursday, Nov. 14, with Henry Enten ’11, senior political data reporter and host of CNN’s Margins of Error; and Feb. 20 with attorney, educator, and women’s rights advocate Anita Hill.