The UC Davis College of Letters and Science has political scientists, historians, security experts and others who can address various issues in the elections this year. This expert guide was initially published in February and again updated in September 2024. Also, here is an article from UC Davis Magazine with our experts calling out some of the larger issues in the upcoming election.

American politics, general elections, public opinion, Congress

Ben Highton, professor in the Department of Political Science, teaches and conducts research in the areas of American politics, public opinion, elections and research methods. He currently serves as a member of the American National Election Studies Board. Contact: bhighton@ucdavis.edu

Erik Engstrom specializes in the study of the U.S. Congress, political parties, and American political development. He is the author of four books: The Politics of Ballot Design (with Jason M. Roberts, 2021, Cambridge), Race, Class, and Social Welfare (with Robert Huckfeldt, 2020, Cambridge), Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy (2013, Michigan) and Party Ballots, Reform, and the Transformation of America’s Electoral System (with Samuel Kernell, 2014, Cambridge, 2015 Winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize). Contact: ejengstrom@ucdavis.edu

Voting Rights

Greg Downs, professor and chair of the Department of History, is an expert on 19th century America and the transformation of the Constitution around the end of slavery, the establishment of equal protection under the law, and the extension of voting rights. He has co-written amicus briefs for the Supreme Court and other federal courts on the relevance of history to contemporary legal debates about voting and affirmative action, among other issues. He is one of 18 historians selected by the Brennan Center at New York University to serve on the council that advises on historical Constitutional issues. Contact: gdowns@ucdavis.edu

Party polarization

Jim Adams, professor in the Department of Political Science, studies parties, elections and public opinion. His work analyzes parties’ election strategies along with the causes of cross-party hostility and distrust in western publics. His book American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective compares Americans’ political anger and distrust with the levels of anger and distrust in 19 other western publics. Contact: jfadams@ucdavis.edu

African American history, civil rights, Black power movement, race, racism, gender, sexuality

Traci Parker, associate professor of history, is a specialist in African American history. Her work focuses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, labor, consumer capitalism, gender, and sexuality. Her first book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), was named a 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

She is the co-editor of The New Civil Rights Movement Reader: Resistance, Resilience, and Justice (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023). Her current book project, Beyond Loving: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Black Freedom Movement, explores activists’ romantic relationships in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Prior to coming to UC Davis, she worked in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. https://traciparker.com , Contact: tparker@ucdavis.edu

Racial and ethnic politics, especially Latinx politics

Brad Jones, professor of political science, teaches and does research in the field of race and ethnic politics, particularly emphasizing immigration policy, attitudes and opinion about immigration, and Latinx politics more generally. His recent work has focused on the implications of deportation policy as well as the relationship between border enforcement and migrant deaths on the U.S.-Mexico border. Jones also focuses on Latinx identity, non-Latinx perceptions of Latinx, and Latinx-relevant public policy, including U.S. immigration policy. 

His work has been published in several leading academic journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Politics of Groups and Identity, and Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. He frequently engages the media on questions related to immigration policy and has been quoted in the Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Pacific Standard and other national media as a leading source of public opinion on immigration and border-related issues. In addition to national media, he has discussed these issues with Australian, French, Italian, Latvian and Northern Irish media outlets. Contact: bsjjones@ucdavis.edu

The New Deal, historic presidencies, electoral college

Eric Rauchway, distinguished professor of history, is an expert on the New Deal and the Second World War, and is prepared to talk about politics and policies designed to thwart fascism.

He commented this spring in a Huffington Post article that compared President Hoover’s presidency to Trump’s, citing failures to act and use presidential authorities in a crisis. He explained how presidential transitions work in the podcast featured in this article, citing the transition from Hoover to Roosevelt as a troubling one. He is interviewed in this PolitiFact article, as well, about how two things, historically, doom former presidents seeking a second term: a bad economy and significant events that get out of control. And he was quoted in Slate in 2024 about the historical effects of women's votes and presidential election outcomes.

Conspiracy theories; roots of modern conservatism

Professor of history and L&S associate dean Kathryn S. Olmsted has long investigated conspiracy theories, from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, and many that have cropped up since, even during the primary and general elections. She authored Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009); it was reissued this year with a new epilogue on the Trump era. She has also written op-eds comparing Watergate and the Trump impeachment inquiry in The New York Times and Washington Post.

In her recent research, she also has re-examined the labor disputes in Depression-era California that led California’s businessmen and media to create a new style of politics with corporate funding, intelligence gathering, professional campaign consultants and alliances between religious and economic conservatives. She has been featured in various podcasts and other media, including CSPAN. Her 2015 book is Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism. 

Her most recent book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, looks at the isolationist media in the U.S. and the U.K. in the 1930s and 1940s. Olmsted also co-edited a book on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and has published journal articles and book chapters that highlight her overlapping areas of expertise: conspiracy theories, government secrecy, espionage, counterintelligence and anticommunism. Contact: 530-752-7764, ksolmsted@ucdavis.edu

Voting behavior, swing voters and election forecasting

Chris Hare, associate professor of political science, uses statistical modeling and innovative quantitative methodology to better understand voting behavior, public opinion and political campaigns. Since 2017, he has taught workshops on machine learning applications in the social sciences for the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis. He is also a co-author of the book Analyzing Spatial Models of Choice and Judgment. Contact: 530-754-0942, cdhare@ucdavis.edu

Aging and memory

Charan Ranganath is a professor in the UC Davis Department of Psychology and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience. He can discuss memory performance and aging. Ranganath is the author of the new book, Why We Remember, which explores how a new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. Ranganath has recently appeared in numerous media outlets including the PBS NewsHour, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and NPR. Contact: cranganath@ucdavis.edu

How media use, and political talk, influences the political divide

Magdalena Wojcieszak, professor of communication, studies how the changing media environment creates both opportunities and challenges for informed publics, tolerant citizenry and responsive governance. She co-authored an op-ed in The Conversation, “Trump Supporters Have Little Trust in Societal Institutions.” She is part of an independent partnership between researchers and Meta to study the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the U.S. 2020 elections. She is also part of the Misinformation Committee at Harvard University’s Social Science One, the first-ever partnership between academic researchers and social media platforms. She also leads several other projects that seek to identify and minimize harmful content on YouTube. Contact: mwojcieszak@ucdavis.edu

Interaction between media and politics

Amber Boydstun, co-chair of the Department of Political Science, studies the interaction between media and politics, with a focus on how different media portrayals of the same policy issue can prompt citizens and policymakers to respond to that issue in different ways. She uses lab experiments, large-scale media studies, and manual and computational text analysis to study how issues make the news; the dynamics of “media storms;” and how media coverage can shape public opinion about policy issues such as immigration, gun control, same-sex marriage and capital punishment. Contact: aboydstun@ucdavis.edu

Media Resources