The upcoming presidential election will be close, important and historic, professors from Dartmouth and other colleges predicted at a panel held Monday afternoon in the Rockefeller Center.
The panel's participants, Brown University political science professor James Morone, St. Anselm's College professor Dean Spiliotes and Dartmouth government professors Ronald Shaiko and Linda Fowler, focused on voter turnout and the potential for a dramatic final stretch to the election.
An animated Morone set the premise for the evening's discussion, highlighting how much is at stake in the election and noting a surprising but welcome surge in the number of young voters.
"That is what makes this election hair-raisingly exciting -- there is a great surge of new voters," Morone said. "The parties are just going nuts signing up all these people. You will win big if you drag those who don't vote to the election bloc."
He advised those following the election to pay close attention to the latest news cycle, as both campaigns are trying to manipulate the final gust of news.
Fowler discussed the many interesting variables driving the outcome of this election, including youth voter turnout. These new voters render the old election modelling system obsolete and make it hard to predict the election's exact outcome, Fowler said.
Spiliotes also examined the possibility for two wildly difficult possible outcomes of the election. Given the country's winner-take-all system, the electoral college vote count could either be split evenly if swing states swing different ways or break decisively in favor of one candidate, if all swing states have diverse outcomes.
Spiliotes also emphasized the four main wild cards in this year's election: under-30 voters, social and religious conservatives, African Americans and Latinos and women.
However, he predicted that single women will continue to support Kerry, while mothers with children will rally around Bush because they perceive him to be stronger on national security. But both Kerry and Bush have been trying to come off as prioritizing national security in an effort to appeal to voters as broadly as possible, Spiliotes said.
"Everyone's a hawk in this election, basically," he said. "The general discourse is who's going to kill the most terrorists, the most quickly."
Morone concluded the evening's discussion just as energetically as he began it with comments about the election's potential to drastically alter the country if voters are ready for a change -- a phenomenon that occurred with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, he said.
Morone advised the audience to try to get a sense of the current political climate to be as well-informed as possible and not be taken too much by surprise, given the results of the 2000 election.
"We've got to ask, is this [election] the unraveling of the political system?" Morone said. "Something got out of Pandora's box last time, and if we don't get it back in, we could be in trouble."
