Election 2020

President Joe Biden’s to-do list is long and his goals are ambitious. We asked Northeastern professors to suggest what’s most important—and most practical—on the economy, healthcare, and social justice.

Calls for President Donald Trump’s removal from the White House continue from both Democrats and Republicans after last week’s riots at the U.S. Capitol. But according to Northeastern law professor Jeremy Paul, while impeachment permanently bars a president from being appointed to a federal position in the future, it’s not clear if that ban also includes elected office, like the presidency. "There's some dispute about that," Paul says.

The pandemic led to myriad changes for students, faculty, and staff across Northeastern’s global network of campuses. The community masked up, socialized from a distance, learned in-person and remotely—and kept adapting and moving forward, in many inspiring ways.

The president-elect tapped a former central banker and a longtime national security adviser to lead the key cabinet posts of Treasury and State. The early personnel announcements signal an emphasis on expertise and experience over political ideology in the White House, Northeastern professors say.

Probably not, because any mandate he tried to impose would likely face court challenges. But there are other ways he can use the power of the presidency to try to get more people on board, including a direct appeal to our conscience, professors Wendy Parmet and Patricia Illingworth say.

In a freewheeling political analysis of the 2020 election, Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for president in 1988, said he is confident in Joe Biden’s ability to manage a surge in pandemic infections and hospitalizations because of the president-elect’s management style of surrounding himself with “excellent people who know what they’re doing.”

On Election Day, Mississippi became the final state to dissociate from the Confederate emblem, an enduring symbol of slavery in the southern U.S. This symbolic change could have lasting impact, says Patricia Davis, an associate professor at Northeastern who studies public memory, identity, race, gender, and representation.

As Biden called for unity in his victory speech on Saturday, Trump polarized the GOP with claims of voter fraud. These two opposing messages are indicative of political trends to come in the next four years, says Costas Panagopoulos, head of the department of political science. “Biden and Harris have a lot of work to do to unite the country. And the GOP will have to do some soul searching.”

With Joe Biden on the verge of claiming the presidency, legal efforts by President Donald Trump to turn the election are equivalent to last-ditch plays at the end of a football game, according to Dan Urman, who teaches Constitutional law and the modern U.S. Supreme Court at Northeastern. “But sometimes Hail Mary passes get caught,” adds Urman.

Trump out-performed polls in nine states by a median of six points, says Nick Beauchamp, assistant professor of political science. “That’s a shockingly large error,” he says. There are several theories why. But either way, it doesn’t portend well for the future of polling, he warns.

It comes down to strategy and technique, says journalism professor Dan Kennedy. “Each news organization came to its decision while trying to be as responsible as possible,” he says.

The election between President Donald J. Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden continues this week, with razor-thin margins in crucial swing states making it too close to call on Tuesday. But one thing was clear early on, said Ted Landsmark, distinguished professor of public policy and urban affairs—the U.S. is as politically polarized as ever, and it’ll take more than a presidential election to bring people back together.

Northeastern partnered with the City of Boston to convert Matthews Arena into a polling place for the community and any students registered to vote at their dorm addresses. Here's how that transformation happened.

In the frenzied weeks before Election Day, the Supreme Court has been asked to consider a number of election cases that could affect the outcome between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden. “It’s like Bush v. Gore is back,” says legal scholar Dan Urman.

People throughout the U.S. agree that COVID-19 is the top problem facing the nation—but there is no such consensus on what comes next, according to a new survey by researchers from Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern, and Rutgers.

Tuesday is Election Day. Get out there and vote. It matters.

In an election unlike any other in modern history, Northeastern Votes has been working hard to ensure that everyone who can cast a ballot on Nov. 3 does. And, they’re making sure people don’t just vote every four years, but get involved in community politics every year.

Some Americans are doubtful of the mail-in voting system as ballots get lost, damaged or fail to arrive in the mail all together. With the pandemic forcing many to choose mail-in voting over in-person voting, some are wondering whether electronic voting would be better. Engin Kirda, profess

Sacha Baron Cohen—star of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”—is using fictional characters to reveal Rudy Giuliani, QAnon followers, and other real-life drivers of the U.S. culture wars on the eve of the presidential election. Has he launched a new form of investigative journalism?

There isn’t much the president can do to change voters’ impressions of his response to the pandemic, the study by researchers from Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern, and Rutgers reported. The politics of the pandemic suggest that some first-time voters are basing their support on the administration’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak

Here are some events that will keep you up to date on all the big political issues leading up to the election.

The Senate is expected to squeak out a vote to send Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court today. Her confirmation, says Dan Urman—who teaches a course at Northeastern on Constitutional law and the modern U.S. Supreme Court—could represent the biggest ideological shift on the court in decades.

Though Trump practiced relatively courteous behavior in the second and final debate on Thursday. But the president failed to cut into Joe Biden’s lead in a meaningful way, said Nicholas Beauchamp, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern.

“This is the pandemic election. It’s a whole different world,” said Sabrina Siddiqui, national politics reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and one of three politics experts who participated in the latest Civic Experience event at Northeastern on Wednesday.

With this week’s debate canceled, the only presidential debate so far featured the longest discussion of climate change of any such showdown to date. But there’s still a long way to go, says Jennie C. Stephens, dean’s professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern.

Nearly 80 million absentee ballots are expected to be cast in the presidential contest, up sharply from 2016. That bodes well for the Democratic candidate and former vice president, a new national study finds.

The debate probably didn’t move the needle in terms of attracting undecideds, Northeastern professors observe. But with a Supreme Court nomination hearing on the way, their discussion set the stage for a looming political conflict

What if we could look back on political debates and extract the information we needed to make informed decisions on issues and candidates? A visualization tool created by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Northeastern may help us do just that.

Yes, says Wendy Parmet, university distinguished professor of law at Northeastern and director of the Center for Health Policy and Law. Especially when other people’s health is involved. “Just because he might recover doesn’t mean everyone is going to recover,” Parmet says. “Telling people not to worry about the pandemic is dangerous.”

Bipartisanship quickly ends as sharp differences continue over the price tag and where the money goes. Democrats favor aid to hospitals, schools, and the Postal Service. GOP opposes money to states and cities, researchers from Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern, and Rutgers found.

Research conducted over the summer suggest that many Americans entered the fall with support for the mail-in voting process. Will President Donald Trump’s attacks on those ballots change Americans’ views about the process?

The first presidential debate of 2020 was unlike any other that Laura Dudley, an assistant clinical professor at Northeastern who specializes in body language, has seen. As she analyzed the candidates’ non-verbal cues, she said, it was impossible for her to overlook the shouting, interrupting, and name-calling between the rivals. Judge for yourself.

Tuesday’s debate between Republican incumbent Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden was marked more by what it wasn’t—a coherent advocacy of policy differences—than what it was. The showdown was nearly 90 minutes of cross-talk, interruptions, and shouting that “both men probably lost,” said Nicholas Beauchamp, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University.