UMass Lowell Political Scientists Available for Interviews
11/03/2020
Contacts for media: Nancy Cicco, 978-934-4944, Nancy_Cicco@uml.edu and Christine Gillette, 978-758-4664, Christine_Gillette@uml.edu
Billed by some as the most important presidential election in U.S. history, the outcome of the race for president between Donald Trump and Joe Biden may influence the country’s political map and U.S. Supreme Court for years to come, according to UMass Lowell experts available for interviews.
With record voter turnout in some states amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, the election has become a referendum on Trump’s job performance, according to polling expert Joshua Dyck, who directs the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion.
“A high-turnout election does President Trump no favors as it has drawn all its attention on him: his record, his positives, his negatives, his strengths and his failings. People headed to the ballot box are doing so to vote for or against him. His chances of victory are minimal, but they aren’t zero. He has to win Pennsylvania to have any chance of earning another term and if everything does indeed hinge on Pennsylvania, it likely won’t be until Friday that absentee votes are counted and we know who won the state. Americans must be prepared for an election week, not an Election Day,” Dyck said.
While polling shows Biden is favored to win the country’s popular vote, it’s more difficult to predict which candidate will earn the magic number of 270 in the Electoral College, according to John Cluverius, associate director of the Center for Public Opinion.
“Right now, the electoral map is all over the place,” Cluverius said. “If Trump wins, he will likely do so with fewer electoral votes than he did in 2016. On the other side, Biden might win with exactly 270, or have a 415 electoral-vote blowout.”
If the vote is close, a legal challenge that could head to the Supreme Court over the validity of ballots cast may happen, according to Morgan Marietta, a constitutional scholar and expert on the high court.
“We’ll know more by Wednesday,” Marietta said. “If there is a meaningful court challenge, it will be perceived to come down to partisanship, but that will be wrong. It will come down to competing visions of the role of the judiciary in our constitutional order. It is not about what is decided but who decides.”
UMass Lowell experts are also available to discuss:
- Demographic shifts in swing states that could reshape the electoral map in the future;
- What it means if Democrats win a majority of seats in the U.S. Senate in this election;
- The future of the Supreme Court with either Trump or Biden as president.
Cluverius, Dyck and Marietta are faculty members in UMass Lowell’s Political Science Department. Dyck is an authority on public opinion research, political campaigns, voter behavior and government. Cluverius is an expert in research methods and state and local politics. Marietta’s articles about the Supreme Court and constitutional issues are widely published. He is the co-author of the book “One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy.”
To arrange an interview with any of them via phone, email or Zoom (or another platform), contact Nancy Cicco at Nancy_Cicco@uml.edu, 978-934-4944, or Christine Gillette at Christine_Gillette@uml.edu, 978-758-4664.