Dornsife fellows discuss past, future elections

Center for the Political Future fellows and political experts gathered at Ground Zero Performance Café Tuesday for a discussion on the current political landscape and the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

The event, “The New Political Landscape,” is part of a series of politically minded events dedicated to the shifting political dynamics of the country and the subsequent effects of last year’s midterm elections. Center co-director Robert Shrum said these events expose students to different viewpoints and start a conversation about significant and often topical issues.

This was the first event attended by the center’s Spring 2019 fellows, Mike Madrid and Symone Sanders. The fellows discussed topics ranging from identity politics to pop culture, all in the context of the recent 2018 midterm election and the upcoming 2020 primaries.

Center co-director Mike Murphy said “big waves” that started in the 2016 elections have continued to affect the political sphere. Yet, he also argued during the discussion that while the 2016 election transformed the political landscape, politics have not changed permanently.

“I don’t think that the rules of politics have changed because after [Trump] won, he got busy becoming very unpopular,” Murphy said. “We just had a midterm election about Trump, and [the Republican party] got the worst wipeout since the Watergate year of 1974, so I think the Trump magic experiment is still very ongoing.”

Madrid, a Republican political consultant, argued that the new political landscape has invited country-wide polarization on issues surrounding race and class. This polarization has become more identifiable due to the increasing diversity in politics, Madrid said. Moreover, he said disparities between socioeconomic classes are more evident than ever.

These topics encouraged Madrid to teach “Race, Class and Partisanship: America and the Great Transformation,” which delves into the importance of race and class distinctions in the modern political sphere.

“The intersection of race and class is something that has fascinated me for 20 to 25 years … and to be able to engage students on those topics, I think is really exciting,” Madrid said. “So for me, in many ways, this event … is really the whole purpose of what I came to spend the spring semester with USC students on.”

During the event, Madrid said the current generation will be the first to leave the country to a non-white majority. Sanders also cited the changing racial makeup of America and how it’s affected the national legislature.

“[The political landscape] is one that’s a lot more female, it’s a lot more ‘melanated,’ if you will,” Sanders said. “This is uncharted territory for some, but again, what’s happening nationally is what has been happening in communities across the country.”

Graduate Student Government President Joycelyn Yip decided to attend the event after hearing that Sanders would be speaking. Speaking about the new political landscape, Yip said that she admires Sanders and is interested in learning more about politics.

“Honestly, I just want to learn more about these fellows,” Yip said. “I think the center is awesome, but [it] should try to reach a larger audience with their events.”

The featured guests also discussed the upcoming Democratic primary elections and if there could be a Republican insurgency in the primaries.

Shrum suggested that the importance of digital fundraising and advertising in recent years means that Democratic candidates will declare their candidacies within the next month or so to get campaigns up and running.

Chantel Douresseaux, a prospective student at the USC Gould School of Law, said while the new political landscape has not affected her personally, she has family members who work for TSA, and they continue to forfeit their salaries amid the government shutdown.

In light of these issues, Shrum argued that the frontrunner in the 2020 primaries will not necessarily be the ideologically pure candidate, but will most likely be the candidate who looks like they can defeat President Donald Trump.

“The changed political landscape right now … is deadlock in government and Washington,” Shrum said. “We can’t even open the government at this point, in fact, they can’t even sit down and talk about it — so that’s going to play out and have a lot of consequences.”