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Post-election breakdown: An interview with Sunshine Hillygus

At ScienceWriters2024, Duke Polarization Lab co-director Sunshine Hillygus dove into polling and exit data from the 2024 U.S. presidential election. (Image: Sarah Stierch/Flickr/CC 1.0)

The 2024 United States presidential election had the American people on the edge of their seats—and science writers from across the country were ready to talk about it at the ScienceWriters2024 conference in Raleigh, N.C.  Especially timely was the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s New Horizons in Science briefing from Sunshine Hillygus, a political scientist at Duke University. In her Nov. 9 talk, “Making Sense of the Polarization of the Presidential Election,” Hillygus shared initial research on the election’s outcomes.

“People are pretty disgusted with politics these days,” she said. Her talk delved into the complexities of American voting trends, focusing on presidential approval rates, party identification, and the influence of independent voters.

After her talk, CASW spoke with her about her work in Duke’s  Polarization Lab, of which she is co-director. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Anai Robinson: How are you feeling today? You went up there and said some really powerful stuff, and I can imagine that your emotions are real as well, too, in this moment.

Sunshine Hillygus:  So it has been a long week, but honestly, one of the things is that I have been the one that’s been…trying to calm down my students and reassure my friends and my family that this isn’t necessarily the end of democracy. This isn’t necessarily going to be, suddenly, they’re living in an America, which is different from what they thought it was. And I think I said this before, but I think, you know, it is not the right message to say that 51% of the public is sexist and racist and transphobic and stupid. If that’s the takeaway from the election, then it really is wrong, but it also makes it very difficult to think about how to move forward and see people in the grocery store and not have a sense of distrust.

AR: What was your objective within today’s presentation?

SH: Although I knew that the conditions were not great for Harris, I had also been lured into the belief [that she would win]. And actually, I gave a talk at St. Olaf College in Minnesota recently, and the student body there won an award for having the highest voter turnout in the country out of private [colleges]. And yet, there was a bit of a lack of enthusiasm, in a way largely reflecting, I think, [student opinions about] the war in Gaza. And so there was some determination. Like, I saw the determination among the young women, right? They’re like…

AR: This is my duty.

SH: Yes!  [as if they are thinking] “Really, I have to deal with this [expletive] again?” Like, I’m gonna have to, but there was not the kind of enthusiasm that I saw in 2008.

AB: Many people were so excited for Obama. “We can do it. Yes, we can. Great.” Is there anything you didn’t get to with your presentation today that you want to address?

SH: Well, we didn’t talk about the work of the Polarization Lab. The basic pitch is that, unfortunately, one of the things that has become more difficult is to study the role of social media in the election. We used to study Twitter a lot, but, you know, people have bailed from Twitter [X]. But also, they are no longer giving academics access to the data in the same way. They’re charging something like $42,000 a month or so [for academic access to data].

AR: Do you think that could have been a factor in the outcome?

SH: No. It just makes it harder for us to make sense of social media. It’s also the case that studying the impact of social media is quite difficult, because people self-select.  So if you go on to Truth Social, chances are you’re either a Trump supporter or you’re going in to infiltrate to see what the Trump supporters are talking about. That makes it really hard to untangle what’s the impact of what’s going on.

There have been successful collaborations. We’ve collaborated with Facebook in the past, for instance. But those collaborations are really at the whim of those corporations, and they put a lot of control on what can be studied, what can be released, what data you can look at. And so those are all more reasons why it’s super difficult to study social media.

This has been tough for many people. There’s no doubt there’s uncertainty. However, it’s not inevitable that things will be as bad as we think.

 

 

Anai Robinson (@AnaiRobinson, she/her) is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Applied Science and Technology program at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where she is both an NSF LSAMP Bridge to Doctorate Fellow and a Title III Chancellor Fellow. Her research focuses on biology, STEM education, and cultivating a growth mindset. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or via email at Anrobinson2@aggies.ncat.edu. This piece was written as part of the ComSciCon-SciWri workshop at ScienceWriters 2024.