Skidmore Hosts Panel Discussion on 2024 Presidential Election
Matthew Continetti, author of “The Right: the Hundred Year War for American Conservatism,” and Ruy Teixeira, co-author of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: the Soul of the Party in an Age of Extremes,” visited Skidmore College on Wednesday to discuss recent changes in American politics, as well as the upcoming presidential election. Photos provided by Skidmore College.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Two renowned political experts visited Skidmore College Wednesday night to discuss how America’s major political parties have changed and what might happen in the upcoming presidential election.
Matthew Continetti, director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the Republican Party “has been rocked over the last decade by the rise of the populist movement that did not exist within the institutional structure of the Republican Party until 2010.”
Continetti compared the Make America Great Again (MAGA) populist movement to the rise of conservatives that began with Barry Goldwater in the 1960s and was cemented with Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s. “MAGA is owning the Republican Party and if Donald Trump wins in November, there really is no going back,” he said.
Continetti said that the Trump MAGA movement has forced the Republican Party to become more centrist on a host of issues, such as abortion, entitlements, and foreign policy. Despite this, Continetti said the election results of 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 showed that Trump “is clearly bad for the Republican Party’s electoral chances.”
Ruy Teixeira, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said the Democratic Party has been “steadily shedding working class voters and steadily gaining college educated, cosmopolitan voters.” Attempting to reclaim those working class voters, Teixeira said, would be a tricky proposition.
“If you’re really going to launch a populist appeal to the working class that is starting to move out of the Democratic Party, you would have to combine not only some sort of populist economic approach, but to get people to take it seriously, you’d also have to move to the center on cultural issues,” Teixeira said.
Teixeira spoke about the rising influence of young women in the Democratic Party, which he said may not necessarily be helpful electorally. “It’s going to push them on these sociocultural issues even farther to the left than they already are,” he said. “That’s probably not good for them, objectively, in terms of appealing to the median voter in the country as a whole.”
Continetti said that reputable polling data showed that polarization was a troubling issue on both sides of the political aisle. “As a consequence of this sharp polarization of the last generation, we have heated rhetoric, we have the idea that each election may be the last election in the United States,” he said.
Both Continetti and Teixeira offered some thoughts on how the upcoming presidential election might turn out, and how the results could impact the future of American politics.
“If Harris wins, Trump will say that the election was stolen and Republicans will believe him,” Continetti said. “Trump will say that the election was stolen because Democrats switched out the candidates after the primary had been closed.”
Teixeira said that if Kamala Harris wins, she’ll likely win by a narrow margin and be forced to work with a Republican Senate. If she loses, Teixeira said, Democrats may need to do some serious rethinking. “If they do lose, it’s going to be because they shed even more working class voters than they could possibly make up by doing better with college educated voters,” he said.
Regardless of the 2024 election’s outcome, Continetti was bullish on Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance’s future. “JD Vance is like Richard Nixon in many ways,” he said. “Richard Nixon was 40 years old when he was elected to the Vice Presidency and he was a major figure in American politics for the next 24 years. I think we could see that with JD Vance as well.”
The panel discussion, “Left, Right, & Center: American Political Parties & the Electorate,” was held at the Tang Museum and moderated by Skidmore Political Science Professors Ron Seyb and Natalie Taylor. The event was part of the college’s ongoing Election 2024 exhibition.