United States Electoral College

• Despite the avalanche of legal indictments, Donald Trump remains favourite to win the Republican nomination for the 2024 US presidential election.
• If he does win the Republican nomination the question is: can he win the presidential election in November next year?

Forecasting presidential elections

• There is a lively community of political scientists using a variety of different methods to forecast elections, with many focusing on the US.
• Most forecasting models use polling data, but since we are 15 months away from the presidential election, current polling should be treated with caution.
• It should be noted that US pollsters have had a mixed record in forecasting elections.

Electoral college

• The election is determined by who wins the electoral college, not the popular vote.
• In the 2016 election Clinton won a larger vote share than Donald Trump but lost the contest in the electoral college.
• The electoral college was created by the US founding fathers, with delegates chosen to reflect voting support for the candidates in each state.

A forecasting model

• The analysis uses a century of elections from 1920 to 2020, and a relatively simple model has a good track record in predicting elections over this period.
• It uses two variables to predict the Republican share of the delegates in the Electoral College, using a technique called multiple regression.
• The first and most important predictor in the model is the state of the economy, with an incumbent being rewarded for a good record on economic growth and punished for a poor one.
• The model takes into account unusual events occurring over the period that can distort the results if they are ignored.
• Needless to say this is uncertain since the model is not a perfect fit to the data and so subject to errors.

• U.S. President Joe Biden has launched his re-election campaign, and we can expect to hear a lot about the need to protect American democracy from the Donald Trump-led Republicans.
• Now that the former president has been held liable for sexually assaulting and defaming columnist E. Jean Carroll, we might also hear about the need to uphold the rule of law and basic standards of human decency.
• But neither Biden nor the progressives who support him say much about protecting the U.S. Constitution.
• As such, they need to rediscover its pro-democratic dimensions so they can work with the document — and make it work for them.

General welfare, equal protection

• The progressive parts of the U.S. Constitution begin in the preamble, which says that one of its core purposes is to “promote the general welfare” as opposed to private interests.
• They were aimed at building a national citizenship based on “the equal protection of the laws,” and they prohibited the states from denying that protection to any American.
• Taken together, the U.S. Constitution’s general welfare and equal protection clauses enable what founding father John Adams called “a more equal liberty” to advance, however unevenly, throughout American history.
• The 14th Amendment also requires the U.S. government to pay its debts, undermining Republican threats to force a catastrophic national default this summer.

Guaranteeing democracy

• They did so by arguing a “Republican” government could not be too democratic, only to find that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider such “purely political” questions.
• That is, they should insist that the “Republican Government” guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution requires basic democratic standards that several GOP-dominated states no longer meet.
• Even by the criteria of ultra-conservative constitutional “originalists,” this argument is straightforward, because the meaning of “a Republican Form of Government” was self-evident in 1787.
• They agreed that republics drew their authority from “we the people,” who made their choices known in periodic elections.

Voting rights

• Citing the guarantee clause, Democrats at the federal level could therefore press states to democratize voting districts and expand voting sites.
• If Congress passed a law to that effect, Biden might even consider using an executive order not just to promote voting rights, but to ensure all citizens have a reasonable chance to vote, even if that means sending the National Guard to polling sites.

• View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221020005222/en/
  LEARNING BY LEGISLATING: K-12 students from all 50 states can enjoy a uniquely engaging civic education experience online and in-person at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston this school year.
• (Photo: Business Wire)
  In 60- and 120-minute sessions, students can learn about government and the legislative process by becoming U.S.
• Highly trained, non-partisan instructors from the Kennedy Institute lead sessions that are available at no charge to public-school students in all 50 states.
• For students in grades 3-5, the Kennedy Institute is pleased to announce the return of the Future Senator program.

• Educational experiences at the Kennedy Institute use immersive role-play and simulation to teach civics and inspire our countrys next generation of leaders.
• A two-minute video showing Kennedy Institute virtual education programs can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVr99Jq4toA .
• Since it opened in 2015, the Kennedy Institute has welcomed more than 100,000 students for in-person and online civic education programs and classes.
• In the coming year, the Kennedy Institute is particularly focused on welcoming more students and teachers from the 44 states outside New England for online programming.