The 2024 U.S presidential race will be closely contested – no surprise there – but voters would be wise to take a broader look at what’s at stake Nov. 5 and beyond, a panel of Sonoma State University political scientists and historians told an audience gathered for the university’s latest “It Matters!” voter engagement event.
The SSU Alumni Association panel discussion on Wednesday night, September 18, featured SSU political science professors Dr. David McCuan and Dr. Emily Ray, as well as history professor Dr. Amy Kittelstrom, in an hour-long session moderated by Dr. Robert Eyler, an SSU economics professor. More than 100 students, faculty, staff, and community members attended the discussion at the Student Center.
Ray led off by noting that one of the most under-discussed yet critical topics each election cycle is the future of outer space and space exploration, one of her areas of research and study. Though it might not be obvious to many voters, outer space involves international relations (with space-traveing allies and foes), global communications, pollution (“unchecked space debris will eventually enclose the planet and make space travel impossible,” Ray said), and climate change.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are not as distinctly different on space issues as they are on other issues, Ray said, and neither one is making space-related topics part of their campaign pitch. Regardless, whoever becomes president will not only help determine how much of the federal budget goes to space programs, but also if the U.S should create missions to Mars and what will be done after the International Space Station – which launched in 1998 and has been continuously occupied since 2000, operated by five space agencies from 15 countries – goes out of service and begins a targeted deorbiting into the Pacific Ocean.
“There’s kind of an open question about what countries are going to do,” Ray said. “That’s not just ending an international space relationship that was established in the ‘90s, but that could restructure the way we have international agreements – friendly agreements – with countries we have unfriendly agreements with in other parts of international relations."
Kittelstrom continued the election conversation through a historical prism, first citing historian Heather Cox Richardson’s 2020 book “How the South Won the Civil War” to underline that “the chilling fact of American history is that we never resolved the Civil War, actually. And we – the people of the United States – allowed the most treasonous, seditious rebels in American history to resume positions of power, influence, and wealth,” Kittelstrom said.
“We are seeing the legacy of that failure dividing our country today.”
Kittelstrom noted that the urban-rural schism is a major aspect of this division but that it in many respects does not fall neatly along partisan lines, and is more broadly about the willingness to “acknowledge and reckon with the past.” This conflict continues, she said, to the point that in 2024, “We are looking at the most stark ideological difference we’ve seen since the eve of the Civil War.”
Harris is committed to an “Americanism” that believes in democracy, equal rights for all, and equality of opportunity, Kittelstrom said, with the government protecting liberties rather than infringing on them. And the other side? She described it as endorsing a “blood and soil nationalism that is so disturbingly echoing actual Nazi rhetoric ... saying some people have a stake in this country based on their ancestry, and demonizing immigrants to such a horrific degree – as we’re seeing in Springfield (Ohio) right now – that honest, hardworking, law-abiding people are subject to terrible threats of violence.
“So the stakes are high.”
McCuan urged audience members, as he does his students, to become psephologists – someone who analyzes elections using historical precinct voting data, opinion polls, campaign finance information, and other statistical data to forecast and explain election results.
“Your job this season – because it is so stark and there is so much at stake, because it’s 1860 but also 1968, 1964, and every other fancy election you can think of all rolled into one – your job is to set all of the noise aside and become and elections forecaster,” he said.
That means setting aside political science, McCuan continued, because political science argues that debates, campaigns, money, vice presidential nominees, and other commonly tracked elements of the election do not matter.
“So the political science gets it wrong every single time. And that’s the joy of what I do,” McCuan said, prompting robust laughter.
Cutting through the “noise” of multiple opinion polls, editorial think pieces, and other information that can clutter election analysis and conversation, McCuan said he “can answer your question before you even ask: If you look at the election today, (Harris) has to be ahead by five points in swing state likely voter polls to have a shot, because of something called gender and racial bias. And she’s got both of those in this election.”
Noting the expertise students develop as they become psephologists, “I can finally say as a political science professor at a university that the folks that are going to save us are 18- to 34-year-olds. And that’s phenomenal."
The panel then fielded questions from the in-person and virtual audiences for the discussion, covering everything from space program funding to which past elections were most like 2024 (the elections of 1860, 1912, and 1968, said Kittelstrom) to the differences in 2024 polling compared to 2020.
– Jeff Keating, AVP, Government Relations & Strategic Communications