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Edited by
Sean D. Foreman, Marcia L. Godwin
& Walter Clark Wilson
THEROADS
TO CONGRESS
2020
Campaigning in the Era of
Trump and COVID-19
The Roads to Congress 2020
Sean D. Foreman · Marcia L. Godwin ·
Walter Clark Wilson
Editors
The Roads
to Congress 2020
Campaigning in the Era of Trump and COVID-19
Editors
Sean D. Foreman Marcia L. Godwin
Department of History and Political Public Administration
Science University of La Verne
Barry University La Verne, CA, USA
Miami, FL, USA
Walter Clark Wilson

Department of Political Science and
Geography
The University of Texas at San
Antonio
San Antonio, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-82520-1 ISBN 978-3-030-82521-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82521-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To the memory of Melanie Blumberg, a valued contributor to The Roads
to Congress book series and to the study of American democracy. She
inspired students to fully engage and participate in the political process
and poured her soul into her service and teaching duties. Mel’s wit and
wisdom and friendly demeanor always made conversations with her bright
and thoughtful.
Preface
Although there are times when every American would refuse to acknowl-
edge it, each biennial congressional election holds up a mirror through
which we can see reflected America’s political character. It is not always
a pretty sight. The pandering, mudslinging, dishonesty, and exploding
influence of moneyed special interests diminish public trust and feelings
of political efficacy. We will never run short, it seems, of flaws that rend
the pluralist ideal. Today, voters across the political spectrum are, in one
way or another, agitated by the perception that democracy’s promise is
being run over by increasingly unequal distributions of wealth, power,
and influence. Those with an appetite for the cringeworthy aspects of
American politics will find plenty of disturbing sustenance in the pages
that follow.
The vices of American democracy tend to grab our attention, but it
is important to also recognize the virtues that shine through. Perhaps
the election “mirror” is cracked and dirty, but look closely and you will
discover that, even when congressional politics seems a tired story you’ve
seen before, change is afoot. And even among its many blemishes, we can
see noble individuals who engage collectively each year, not knowing one
another or even coordinating beyond a shared commitment to democracy,
to ensure that the American experiment lives on to fight another day.
While the election mirror can show us important aspects of who we are,
both good and bad, it is also important to remember that self-reflection
is mostly important for understanding not who we are, but who we can
vii
viii PREFACE
be, and what must be done. This book is an effort to hold up a mirror
on the political soul of the USA so that readers can better understand
the current state of democracy in America, and more effectively engage
as citizens in the future. Its chapters offer varied insights from scholars
of different backgrounds, regions, and perspectives. To accelerate here,
or change lanes there, take the on or the off ramp, good drivers always
first check the mirrors. So, examine the chapters of this book with care,
and then get in the democratic driver’s seat reserved just for you, citizen.
We’ll see you down the road.
Miami, USA Sean D. Foreman

La Verne, USA Marcia L. Godwin
San Antonio, USA Walter Clark Wilson
Acknowledgments
Sean Foreman acknowledges that without Walt Wilson and Marcia

Godwin and their tremendous work and encouragement, this project
may have stalled. Foreman fed from the enthusiasm of the coeditors and
the dedication of the contributors to persist with the project through
the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020–21. What follows is a testa-
ment to the benefits of working collaboratively and a collective desire
to keep alive this decades-old forum for studying congressional elections
and highlighting crucial case studies and campaign themes. Foreman also
appreciates his family’s love, patience, and support, as always, along the
way.
Marcia Godwin appreciates colleagues, contributors, and students for
their support of higher education, scholarship, and public service during
the pandemic. Students and alumni of the University of La Verne continue
to inspire with their dedication to providing service in the most chal-
lenging of times. Appreciation also goes to her parents and brothers for
their support and contributions. Specific to this volume, Godwin appre-
ciates Gina Woodall for accepting her invitation to join as a contributor.
Sean Foreman and Walt Wilson are fantastic colleagues and editors in The
Roads to Congress series.
Walter Wilson thanks Sean Foreman and Marcia Godwin for their
friendly collaboration on this project. Participating as an author and editor
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
for the Roads to Congress series has been an enjoyable and rewarding expe-
rience. He also thanks the many new and repeat contributors to the 2020
edition and looks forward to future collaborations.
Finally, a word about Melanie Blumberg’s contributions. She was a
font of knowledge and insight about American electoral politics. The
last email exchanges with her were about the then-crowded Democratic
2020 primary field for president. Her emails were pithy, humorous, and
insightful—sure to brighten the day and reassure us about American
democracy.
Contents
Part I Congressional Campaign and Election Trends

1 The 2020 Elections Overview: A Campaign Cycle
Like No Other 3
Sean D. Foreman
2 The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the 2020
Elections 17
Christopher J. Galdieri, Jennifer C. Lucas,
and Tauna S. Sisco
3 Stress Test: Three Case Studies on Vote by Mail
During a Global Pandemic 37
John D. Rackey and C. Tyler Godines Camarillo
4 Getting Good and Mad: Exploring the Use of Anger
on Twitter by Female Candidates in 2020 53
Heather K. Evans, Bryan T. Gervais, and Annelise Russell
Part II U.S. House of Representatives Case Studies

5 Southern California’s Flipped Congressional Districts:
Bumpy Roads to Reelection and Defeat 75
Marcia L. Godwin
xi
xii CONTENTS
6 Florida’s 26th and 27th Congressional Districts: No

Socialists, No Communists, No Way 101
Sean D. Foreman
7 New York’s 22nd Congressional District: Brindisi V.
Tenney: Round Two 125
Jeffrey Kraus
8 Oklahoma’s District 5th Congressional Race: Deep
Red Mobilization Defeats the Blue Wave Incumbent 147
William Curtis Ellis
9 Texas’s 21st–24th Congressional Districts: Texas
Blues: Democrats’ Bid to Flip Texas Falls Short 167
Walter Clark Wilson
10 Virginia’s 7th Congressional District: Birth
of a Bellwether 185
Patrick T. Hickey
Part III U.S. Senate Case Studies

11 Alabama U.S. Senate Race: A Referendum
on the Trump Presidency 209
Tom Lansford
12 Arizona U.S. Senate Race: McSally vs. Kelly—Veteran
vs. Veteran, A Fight to the End 227
Gina Serignese Woodall
13 Iowa U.S. Senate Campaign: Confirmation of Party
Realignment in the Hawkeye State 245
Douglas M. Brattebo
14 Kansas U.S. Senate Campaign: An Open Seat,
But Not Enough of an Opening for Democrats 265
Thomas Ringenberg
15 Maine U.S. Senate Race: Independent-Minded
Republican Senator Susan Collins Retains Her Seat
with Crossover Appeal 283
William C. Binning
CONTENTS xiii
Part IV Roads Ahead

16 American Elections at a Crossroads: Lessons Learned
and the Road Ahead 303
Walter Clark Wilson
Index 323
Notes on Contributors
William C. Binning is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at

Youngstown State University. He is the coauthor of Ohio Government and
Politics.
Douglas M. Brattebo is a Professor of Political Science at Hiram
College. He writes about presidents, political parties, public policy issues,
and campaigns and elections.
C. Tyler Godines Camarillo is a graduate student in the Department of
Political Science at the University of Oklahoma.
William Curtis Ellis is a Professor of Political Science and Dean of the
College of Arts and Cultural Studies at Oral Roberts University.
Heather K. Evans is the John Morton Beaty Professor of Political
Science at the University of Virginia, Wise.
Sean D. Foreman is a Professor of Political Science and Chair of the
Department of History and Political Science at Barry University in Miami,
FL. He is a coeditor of six The Roads to Congress books including this
one and The Roads to Congress 2018 with Palgrave Macmillan. Foreman
and Marcia L. Godwin edited Local Politics and Mayoral Elections in
21st Century America: The Keys to City Hall with Routledge in 2015.
Foreman is the author of many articles and book chapters on public
policy and elections, including “Obama and Congress,” in Leadership and
Legacy: The Presidency of Barack Obama, edited by Tom Lansford, et al.
xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
(2021), and “Money in Politics,” in Divided Union: Structural Challenges

to Bipartisanship in America, edited by Dario Moreno, et al. (2021). He
was the President of the Florida Political Science Association (FPSA) in
2012, he has served as secretary of FPSA since 2015. Foreman is co-
chair of the Campus Democracy Project at Barry University, promoting
civic learning and democratic engagement, serves on several commu-
nity boards, and is a frequent commentator on politics and elections for
numerous local, national, and international outlets.
Christopher J. Galdieri is an Associate Professor of Politics at Saint
Anselm College. He is a frequent commenter on New Hampshire elec-
tions and presidential primary politics and the author of Stranger in a
Strange State: The Politics of Carpetbagging from Robert Kennedy to Scott
Brown and Donald Trump and New Hampshire Politics.
Bryan T. Gervais is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political
Science and Geography and coordinator of the Digital Politics Studio at
the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Marcia L. Godwin is a Professor of Public Administration and Master
of Public Administration (MPA) Director at the University of La Verne.
She is a longtime contributor to The Roads to Congress series and became
a coeditor in 2016. Her research has been published in Administrative
Theory and Praxis; Journal of Public Affairs Education; Policy Studies
Journal; Politics, Groups, and Identities; State and Local Government
Review; Teaching Public Administration; and other publications. She also
has served as coeditor and contributor, with Sean D. Foreman, of Local
Government and Mayoral Elections in 21st Century America. Godwin
provides commentary on California politics and local government issues
to regional, national, and international media.
Patrick T. Hickey is a Professor of Political Science at Prince George’s
Community College. His research has been published in Presidential
Studies Quarterly, Congress & the Presidency, The Roads to Congress 2018
and 42: Inside the Presidency of Bill Clinton.
Jeffrey Kraus is a Professor of Government and Politics and the Provost
and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Wagner College. He has been
a contributor to this series since 2008.
Tom Lansford is a Professor of Political Science at the University of
Southern Mississippi. He is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
more than 40 books and the author of more than 100 essays, book
chapters, and reviews on politics, elections, and international security.
Jennifer C. Lucas is a Professor of Politics at Saint Anselm College. Her
research, which focuses on the role of gender in campaigns, public policy,
and congressional politics, has appeared in Politics & Gender, American
Political Research, and Social Science Quarterly. She is the former coeditor
of the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy.
John D. Rackey is an Editorial Assistant for Social Science Quarterly, a
Teaching Assistant in the Department of Political Science, and a Graduate
Mentor with Headington College, at The University of Oklahoma.
Thomas Ringenberg is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Rockhurst University in Kansas City. Ringenberg was an American Polit-
ical Science Association Congressional Fellow in the House of Represen-
tatives in 2016. His work has appeared in PS: Political Science and Politics,
Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, and Great Plains Research.
Annelise Russell is an Assistant Professor in the Martin School for Public
Policy and Public Administration at the University of Kentucky.
Tauna S. Sisco is a Professor of Sociology at Saint Anselm College. Her
research interests include studies of social problems, women and politics,
and healthcare practice. She is the coeditor of several edited volumes on
U.S. elections. She has also published in Journal of Women, Politics, and
Policy, Feminist Media Studies, and the Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Walter Clark Wilson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Texas at San Antonio. He is a graduate of the University
of Oklahoma’s Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center
and is a 2006–2007 APSA Congressional Fellow. Dr. Wilson’s research
focuses primarily on Latino representation in the U.S. Congress. He
is the author of From Inclusion to Influence: Latino Representation in
Congress and Latino Political Incorporation in America, published by
University of Michigan Press (2017), and hehas published in scholarly
journals including Legislative Studies Quarterly; Social Science Quarterly;
Politics, Groups and Identities; and Polity. He has also been a frequent
contributor to previous editions of The Roads to Congress, and coedited
the 2018 edition. Wilson’s commentary has been featured in local, state,
and national newspapers, radio and television news programs, including
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
by Texas Public Radio, The San Antonio Express-News, Politico, and The
New York Times.
Gina Serignese Woodall is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics
and Global Studies at Arizona State University. Woodall has published
with colleagues in the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, Political
Behavior, and the Journal of Political Science Education. She has also
published work in The Conversation and the London School of Economics
American Politics and Policy Blog (LSE APP).
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Mail-in ballot percentage by Democratic percentage

and overall vote 45
Fig. 4.1 Gender and negative affect in tweets in 2018 58
Fig. 4.2 Angry words per candidate in 2020 House tweets
by gender and party 61
Fig. 4.3 Affect in 2018 House tweets by gender and party 61
Fig. 4.4 Rate of angry words in 2018 House tweets by gender
and party 62
Fig. 4.5 Rate of angry words in 2020 House tweets by gender
and party 62
Fig. 5.1 California District 25 (Hill/Garcia, Northern Los Angeles
County) voter registration 77
Fig. 5.2 California District 39 (Cisneros/Kim, Mostly Northern
Orange County) voter registration 79
Fig. 5.3 California District 45 (Porter, Orange County) voter
registration 80
Fig. 5.4 California District 48 (Rouda/Steel, Orange County) voter
registration 81
Fig. 5.5 California District 49 (Levin, San Diego/Orange Counties)
voter registration 82
Fig. 5.6 Rep. Katie Porter (D-45) Halloween 2019, House
Financial Services Committee 84
Fig. 6.1 Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) tweet describing herself
and her 2020 candidacy 114
xix
List of Tables
Table 1.1 Partisan breakdown of U.S. Senate and U.S. House,

2008–2020 7
Table 5.1 Campaign expenditures, Southern California’s flipped
congressional districts, 2020 91
Table 5.2 Election results, Southern California’s flipped
congressional districts, 2020 93
Table 6.1 Results of Florida’s 26th Congressional District
campaigns, 2010–2020 104
Table 6.2 Results of Florida’s 27th Congressional District
campaigns, 2012–2020 112
Table 7.1 Voter enrollment by party affiliation and status, New
York 22nd Congressional District, 2020 127
Table 7.2 Total raised and spent, New York 22nd Congressional
District, 2020 137
Table 7.3 New York’s 22nd Congressional District general
election results, 2020 140
Table 8.1 Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District size
and demographics 150
Table 8.2 Oklahoma 5th Congressional District election results
by county, 2012–2018 152
Table 8.3 Oklahoma 5th Congressional District election results
by county, 2020 160
Table 9.1 Selected Texas congressional race characteristics, 2020 172
Table 9.2 Change in margin for Trump, Texas counties, 2016
to 2020 179
xxi
xxii LIST OF TABLES
Table 12.1 Fundraising in the 2020 U.S. Senate Race by individual,

PAC, and self-financing 238
Table 14.1 Kansas 2020 U.S. Senate fundraising by candidate
and category 276
Table 15.1 Campaign finance, 2020 Maine Senate race 295
PART I
Congressional Campaign and Election Trends

CHAPTER 1
The 2020 Elections Overview: A Campaign

Cycle Like No Other
Sean D. Foreman
Unprecedented Campaign Year

The 116th Congress, (2019–2021) and the accompanying 2020
campaign cycle were unprecedented in many ways. First, they occurred
during a global pandemic caused by the spread of the novel coron-
avirus named COVID-19. This forced candidates to be both cautious
and creative on the campaign trail starting in March 2020. In-person
campaigning was limited and door-to-door canvassing was often discour-
aged, especially by Democratic candidates, while online and virtual
activities proliferated and engaged voters in new ways, sometimes directly
from a candidate’s home to the homes of constituents.
The pandemic whipsawed a humming economy into recession by mid-
2020 after Americans were largely confined to their homes from late
March through the end of May and sporadically over the summer in
different parts of the country to “stop the spread” of the virus. Travel,
entertainment, hospitality, and tourism ground to a halt and caused major
S. D. Foreman (B)
Department of History and Political Science, Barry University, Miami, FL, USA
e-mail: sforeman@barry.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

Switzerland AG 2022
S. D. Foreman et al. (eds.), The Roads to Congress 2020,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82521-8_1
4 S. D. FOREMAN
job losses and lost revenues. The unemployment rate of 3.5% in February
skyrocketed to 14.8% in April and resulted in the need for massive
economic relief which took the form of two major stimulus packages, the
Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in March
2020 and the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropri-
ations (CRRSA) Act of 2021. These acts provided direct payments of
stimulus money to individuals and families that qualified as well as a
series of loan and subsidy programs targeting specific economic industries.
Unemployment decreased to 6.8% in the October labor report preceding
the elections, but many parts of the economy stalled and regions of
the country closed due to state and local regulations and local virus
conditions.
The summer of 2020 was also marked by massive rallies and protests in
the wake of the tragic killing of George Floyd, a Black citizen, by a White
Minneapolis, MN, police officer, on May 25, Memorial Day. The inci-
dent, along with revelations about the police shooting of Breonna Taylor
in Louisville, KY and other high-profile incidents of violence against
Black Americans, led to large gatherings in cities nationwide concerning
racial justice and policing policies. The protests were loosely coordi-
nated under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement,
though they were generally organized organically and based on local lead-
ership and conditions. Most were peaceful as the organizers planned, but
many gatherings also led to property destruction, looting, and additional
violence, sometimes instigated by counter-protesters associated with white
nationalist groups.
The BLM movement, which was founded in 2015, also fueled efforts
to engage Black and Hispanic voters in the electoral process. A political
action committee was formed to support candidates and promote legis-
lation in favor of police reform. Fundraising efforts were geared toward
helping to register voters and encouraging them to vote in both local and
presidential elections. Messages about the need to vote to bring about
racial justice and tangible changes to policing policies were prevalent and
supported by athletes, celebrities, clergy, and community leaders. Ulti-
mately, the movement appeared to aid Democratic presidential candidate
Joe Biden and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris who captured the
White House, in part, by winning key states like heavily African American
Georgia.
Then, there was the unusual presidential term of Donald J. Trump,
chief disruptor of the Washington, DC status quo as president from 2017
1 THE 2020 ELECTIONS OVERVIEW: A CAMPAIGN CYCLE … 5
to 2021. Trump stirred controversy with his rhetoric and erratic lead-
ership style and was ultimately impeached twice by the House in two
years, the first president in American history to be subjected to two Senate
impeachment trials.
Impeachment
From the start of the Trump presidency, there were Democrats who
wanted to impeach Donald Trump. The ongoing investigation into
the 2016 presidential campaign and allegations of coordinated efforts
between the Trump campaign and members of the Russian government
provided the most substantive justification, at least initially. The Mueller
Report, named for the Special Counsel Robert Mueller who led the
investigation, and officially called the “Report on the Investigation into
Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” was delivered to
U.S. Attorney General William Barr in March 2019 and released to the
public on April 18, 2019. Mueller did not provide any special instructions
for Congress or any specific recommendations to them beyond the public
release.
Analysts suggested that Mueller had laid out a roadmap to impeach
Trump. The 448-page report was broken into two parts. The first part
detailed specific Russian interference in the 2016 elections through the
manipulation of internet and social media sites and pushing misinforma-
tion and divisive messages into the public discourse. The second part of
the report focused on Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey in
May 2017 which was viewed as a bald-faced attempt to obstruct and
then outright halt the Mueller investigation. The investigations implicated
some lower-level operatives associated with the Trump campaign, but
the report did not include specific, direct statements of criminal charges
against Trump or any senior-level officials or family members involved in
the campaign.
While House Democrats spent the summer of 2019 digging into the
Mueller report and seeking to draft articles of impeachment concerning
obstruction of justice, new information emerged to shift and intensify the
focus on Trump’s behavior. In August of 2019, a whistleblower came
forward to report troubling comments by Trump in a July 25 phone call
with the president of Ukraine. The readout of the call revealed Trump
asking the Ukrainian president to do “a favor” in exchange for continued
6 S. D. FOREMAN
shipment of U.S. military aid. The favor was to flame a dormant inves-
tigation into a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, which
employed Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, with a lucrative contract despite
no experience in the field. The investigation into the company had not
implicated either Biden, but Trump continued to push a story that both
Bidens were financially corrupted by their dealings with Ukraine.
The call was reported by a national security official and led to a
congressional inquiry that lasted from September through November.
Two articles of impeachment were introduced in the House, and on
December 18, 2019, the House impeached Trump on charges of abuse
of power and obstruction of Congress. No Republicans voted to impeach
while all but a few Democrats voted to impeach on both charges. Jared
Golden (D-ME2) voted to impeach on the second charge while Collin
Peterson (D-MN7) and Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ2) voted against both
charges. Van Drew soon left the Democratic Party to become a Repub-
lican and was later reelected in his South Jersey district. Peterson lost his
reelection bid.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA12) stalled in delivering the articles to
the Senate until Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would transparently
clarify the rules for the trial. The articles were delivered on January 15,
2020, and a trial started the following week. On February 5, the Senate
acquitted Trump on the two charges along a party-line vote. Only one
Republican voted to remove Trump on the abuse of power charge; that
was Mitt Romney (R-UT), the 2012 Republican presidential nominee,
one of the few Republicans willing to publicly criticize Trump.
Congress Stands Divided

The 116th Congress suffered from the consequences of partisan divide
over the past decade, culminating in divided government again in
America. Democrats took the majority in the House after the November
2018 midterm elections (see Table 1.1). This paved the path for Pelosi to
become Speaker of the House for a second time. Support for her speak-
ership within the Democratic caucus was not as unified as it was during
her first stint as House Speaker, but she won the vote in 2019 with 15
Democrats defecting. After the 2020 election, Democrats faced a greater
need for unity and all but five caucus members voted to keep her as
Speaker. Pelosi announced and reaffirmed that she would relinquish the
Speaker’s seat after the 2022 elections.1
Table 1.1 Partisan breakdown of U.S. Senate and U.S. House, 2008–2020
Year Senate House

Democrats Republicans Independents Net Democrats Republicans Net
change change
2008 57 41 2 +8 D 257 178 +24 D

2010 51 47 2 +6 R 193 242 +64 R
2012 53 45 2 +2 D 201 234 +8 D
2014 44 54 2 +9 R 188 247 +13 R
2016 46 52 2 +2 D 194 241 +6 D
2018 45 53 2 +1 R 235 200 +41 D
2020 48 50 2 +3 D 222 213 +13 R
Notes Both Independents in the Senate caucus with Democrats. Numbers reflects election results and
do not account for membership changes during a congressional session
Throughout Trump’s term in office, Republicans maintained the

Senate majority they gained in the 2014 elections. Republicans held a
diminished majority of 52 seats after the 2016 election and the election
of Donald Trump. In 2018, with a favorable Senate election map, the
GOP increased its majority by one seat. But in 2020, the map appeared
to favor Democrats.2 Still, Democrats just netted one seat out of the
November election outcomes with two Georgia seats held by Republicans
Sonny Purdue and Kelly Loeffler headed to the January runoff elections.
With control of a Senate majority by the slimmest of margins hanging
in the balance, Democrats ran a nationalized campaign in support of Jon
Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. Meanwhile, Republicans were sniping
at each other in the aftermath of the presidential election, spurred by
Trump’s false claims that he won Georgia’s electoral votes and subse-
quent attempts to coerce state leaders, including Georgia’s Republican
governor and secretary of state, to change the outcome of the vote. This
put Purdue and Loeffler in the difficult position of needing to appeal
to their pro-Trump base voters while at the same time trying to sepa-
rate themselves from Trump’s attempts to overturn the election result.
Combined with effective Democratic mobilization and ethical concerns
facing both Republican candidates, the predicament was enough to allow
both Ossoff and Warnock to prevail.
Courtesy of outgoing Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote,
Sen. McConnell (R-KY) remained the Majority Leader of a Senate that
8 S. D. FOREMAN
was split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans until the presiden-
tial inauguration on January 20, 2021. The lame duck position placed
him between Senate Democrats eager to join their House counterparts
in control of the chamber and Republicans more aligned with President
Trump and his brand of populism than McConnell’s more traditional
style of conservatism. McConnell had famously said that he would do
what it took to make Barack Obama a one-term president, and while he
failed to contain Obama’s electoral ambitions, he did succeed at curtailing
his achievements, most notably by rolling back provisions in the Afford-
able Care Act and by withholding Senate action on a Supreme Court
nominee in the final year of Obama’s term. Now McConnell was faced
with keeping his Republican conference in line as the ideological lines
shifted across the country.
What’s Good for the Goose…?

When Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, it set off a
firestorm in Washington over filling the seat. Republicans argued that the
Supreme Court vacancy should not be filled by term-limited President
Barack Obama because it occurred too close to a presidential election and
that precedent called for waiting to fill the seat until after the American
people selected a new President in the November election. Obama nomi-
nated Merrick Garland, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
D.C. Circuit, in hopes that a moderate selection might generate bipar-
tisan support. Instead, Republicans blocked Garland’s nomination from
even receiving a vote in the Senate and the “Scalia seat” vacancy became
a rallying cry for supporting Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the
2016 campaign. Trump won the election and promptly nominated Neil
Gorsuch, who was confirmed in April 2017, by a 52 to 48 party-line vote.
The relatively quick confirmation of Gorsuch was aided by McConnell
and Republicans removing the prohibition on the use of the filibuster on
Supreme Court nominees. Senate Democrats started the erosion of the
filibuster in 2013 for all presidential nominees except the Supreme Court
in order to facilitate the confirmation of lower court judges appointed
by Obama. Republicans then used their newly instituted voting rules to
approve two more Trump appointees to the high Court during Trump’s
term.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan and
confirmed in February 1988, announced his retirement in late June
2018. After a contentious confirmation process, Brett Kavanaugh, a

former Kennedy law clerk, was confirmed in October 2018. Along with
the confirmation of scores of other federal judges, Trump satisfied his
electoral base with judicial nominations.
On September 18, 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg unexpectedly
died. Though the legendary jurist had health concerns at age 87, she
appeared to be publicly strong. While this vacancy occurred less than
two months before the November elections, Republicans sang a different
tune in 2020 than they had when Scalia died nearly nine months before
the election. Eight days after Ginsburg’s death, Trump nominated Amy
Coney Barrett, whom he had appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. Due to the end of filibusters on Court
nominees, the Senate was able to quickly confirm Coney Barrett, and did
so less than a week before the election on October 30.
The flurry of activity further stoked Democratic outrage toward
Trump. It may have reduced the urgency to vote on the part of some
Republicans, though it probably also led others to reward the party
with more enthusiastic turnout. Exit polls indicate that Supreme Court
appointments were indeed an important factor to both Trump and Biden
voters.
Intraparty Battles
An enduring feature of the past decade has been the growing ideological
divide among the American public.3 Both parties have witnessed unusu-
ally intense intraparty squabbles that have pulled the median Democratic
and Republican voters away from the ideological center. Democrats have
grappled with insurgent candidates from the left wanting to make the
party more progressive and less corporate-minded. The battle lines are
drawn over policies on social welfare programs, wealth inequality and
wages, environmental concerns, immigration, gun control, and voting
issues, in particular. Republicans have been wrestling over defining
their stances on conservative positions like trade, taxes, and govern-
ment spending and regulations since the election of “tea party” and
Trump-aligned lawmakers and the adoption of more extreme public
positions.
While four incumbents lost primaries both in 2016 and in 2018,
there were eight incumbents (five Republicans and three Democrats)
to lose primary challenges in 2020.4 Not unlike 2018, when two
newcomers, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY14) and Ayanna Pressley
10 S. D. FOREMAN
(D-MA7) defeated long-term incumbents, Democrats witnessed contests

with primary challenges from candidates with more progressive stances
on social and environmental policies. One high-profile insurgency attempt
emerged, somewhat ironically, from an iconic political family. U.S. Rep.
Joseph Kennedy III attempted to defeat incumbent Senator Ed Markey
in Massachusetts. Viewed as a rising star in the party, the 39-year-old
Kennedy held leads in the public opinion polls over the 74-year-old
Markey and highlighted, among other issues, how he was vocal in the
fight for racial justice.5 Markey mobilized grassroots support and some
high-profile endorsements from fellow Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-
MA) and from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, with whom Markey had co-authored
the climate change focused Green New Deal bill. Ultimately, Markey
“out-progressived” Kennedy in the Democratic primary to hold his seat.
Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley joined with two other newly elected
females, Ilhan Omar (D-MN5) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI13) in calling
themselves “the squad” and forming an informal progressive caucus.
The women embraced the label even while Republican commentators
and Trump used it derisively. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed several 2020
candidates, notably progressive women in Democratic primaries.6 Those
candidates overall had mixed success. A Texas Senate candidate and
candidates for House seats in California, New York, and Texas lost
primaries. Kara Eastman (D-NE2) won an open seat primary but lost
the general to a Republican incumbent. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-
NM3) won a competitive primary and the open seat. Marie Newman
(D-IL3) defeated eight-term incumbent Dan Lipinski (D-IL3) and won
the general election.
The impact of the BLM movement was especially prominent in a pair
of Democratic primary elections. In St. Louis, Missouri-based district
surrounding Ferguson, BLM activist Cori Bush defeated 19-year incum-
bent William Clay. Both Bush and Clay are Black, but community
members found Clay to be out of touch with the pulse of the move-
ment and backed Bush, who was aligned with the progressive Justice
Democrats, all but assuring her election to represent Missouri’s 1st
Congressional District. Similarly, Jamaal Bowman, a public school prin-
cipal also backed by Justice Democrats, defeated 16-term incumbent Eliot
Engel in the Democratic primary for New York’s 16th District. Bowman
ran an anti-poverty and anti-racist platform and was inspired by the intra-
party insurgency success of fellow New Yorker Ocasio-Cortez. Efforts to
move the Democratic Party leftward on racial justice and other issues were
not universally successful. For example, conservative Democrat Henry

Cuellar (D-TX28) survived a primary challenge from 27-year-old activist
Jessica Cisneros by less than four percent of the vote. Still, these and
other examples illustrate a growing appetite for leftward movement in
the Democratic Party.
Several races pitted moderate Republican candidates against more
conservative and Trump-aligned candidates in their primaries. There
were even instances of two or more Trump-aligned candidates running
against one another, such as in Virginia’s 5th District, where Denver
Riggleman lost an intraparty battle during the Republican convention
to select the party’s nominees.7 Riggleman was endorsed by Trump in
2018 and then again enthusiastically on December 17, 2019, with this
tweet: “Congressman @Denver4VA Riggleman is a true CONSERVA-
TIVE leader who has done a great job for Virginia and will support
our #MAGA Agenda. He defends our right to bear arms, protect our
Borders & help small businesses. Denver has my Total Endorsement!”
But the president’s support for Riggleman waned when Riggleman found
himself in the crosshairs of more religiously conservative members of
Congress and constituents in his district. He was criticized by some party
members for officiating a gay wedding in the summer of 2019, and subse-
quently challenged for the nomination by Bob Good, a former athletic
director at Liberty University. Then president of Liberty, Jerry Falwell,
Jr. backed Riggleman while Falwell’s brother and Riggleman’s prede-
cessor, Rep. Tom Garrett, supported Good. Good won a convention vote
that Riggleman claimed was fraudulent and went on to win the general
election. Other important Republican primaries between Trump-aligned
candidates included Senate races in Alabama (see Chapter 11) and Kansas
(see Chapter 14) discussed in this volume.
Sizing Up the 2020 Elections

There were 56 rematches of Democratic and Republican candidates in
2020 from 2018. In four cases, the 2018 winner was on the losing end in
2020: in California’s 21st and 39th Districts (see Chapter 5, this volume),
in Florida’s 27th District (see Chapter 6, this volume), and in New York’s
22nd District (see Chapter 7, this volume).
Five Democrats and 20 Republicans retired from the House and did
not run for another public office. The Republican retirements included
many moderate members who were not comfortable with Trumpism. One
12 S. D. FOREMAN
was Rep. Justin Amash (MI-3), who left the GOP and became an inde-
pendent before joining the Libertarian Party in April 2020. Amash was
one of Trump’s first and most outspoken Republican critics. After leaving
the GOP and declining to seek reelection, Amash briefly flirted with a run
for president but ultimately decided against that campaign as well.
As a result of the 2020 congressional elections, Democrats held the
majority in the House of Representatives. Republicans won 16 of the
21 seats needed to gain the majority, dropping the partisan advantage
Democrats held to 222-213 heading into the 117th Congress. Democrats
flipped three seats while Republicans flipped 15, including recapturing the
seat previously held by Amash. While winning at the top of the ticket with
Biden, the coattails were not enough to overcome electoral conditions in
certain districts across the country due to cultural or regional differences
and the effects of gerrymandered districts.
Democrats needed four seats to win outright control of the Senate or
to net three seats plus the presidential victory to gain the vice presidential
tie-breaking vote. Indeed Biden/Harris defeated Trump/Pence by 306-
232 in the Electoral College aided by winning Pennsylvania, Michigan,
and Wisconsin, along with Arizona and Georgia. With the two Georgia
races going to January runoffs and partisan control of the Senate on the
line—and the disputed though discredited claims of election fraud by
Trump—the campaign continued through the end of the year and into
January.
Breaking Down the Roads to Congress 2020

The Roads to Congress 2020 starts with a section on thematic issues. In
Chapter 2, Jennifer C. Lucas, Christopher J. Galdieri, and Tauna S. Sisco
examine the impact of COVID-19 on the elections. There were several
changes in both how candidates campaigned and how elections were
administered and a wide variety of policies across the country. But while
there were concerns that the election administration and counting process
would be chaotic, much like the over-hyped Y2K event two decades
earlier, they proved largely unfounded thanks to the preparation and hard
work of election officials. In fact, the 66.7% voter turnout was the highest
nationally since 1900, when most women and people of color were barred
from voting.
Chapter 3 examines the impact of vote by mail during the pandemic.

John D. Rackey and C. Tyler Godines Camarillo examine Georgia, Okla-
homa, and Washington and find a large disparity in 2020 along party lines
between who took advantage of vote by mail systems with Democrats
outpacing Republicans in each of the states examined. In Chapter 4,
Heather K. Evans, Bryan T. Gervais, and Annelise Russell review the
use of “angry” words by congressional candidates, with special focus on
female candidates. They find differences in tweet rates, and the use of
angry rhetoric that speak to differing communication strategies. Among
other items, they demonstrate that female candidates tweet more angry
words in the late stages of the campaign than male candidates, regardless
of political party.
Part II contains case studies on House campaigns. Marcia Godwin
examines several swing districts in Southern California in Chapter 5.
Democrats flipped five districts in 2018 in this already deeply Demo-
cratic part of the state. Godwin explores why three of the five flipped
back to Republican hands in 2020 despite structural advantages favoring
Democrats. In Chapter 6, Sean Foreman probes the reasons why in Flori-
da’s Districts 26 and 27, two freshman Democratic women, the first
non-Cuban-Americans to hold these south Florida seats, were defeated
by well-known Cuban-American Republicans, a county mayor and a tele-
vision personality, in part by pushing the narrative that their opponents
would usher in socialism in America. Chapter 7 features Jeffrey Kraus’s
examination of the rematch in New York’s 22nd District between Demo-
crat Anthony Brindisi and Claudia Tenney where Tenney, a Republican,
recaptured her seat in this central part of the state. Tenney won in part by
appealing to pro-Trump strategies that led to his vocal 2016 support of
her while trying to capitalize on backlash against the “defund the police”
message that accompanied national BLM rallies.
In Chapter 8, William Curtis Ellis investigates Oklahoma’s 5th
Congressional District where Stephanie Bice defeated Kendra Horn. In
2018, Horn became the first Democrat to win the district in 40 years.
But two years later, the Republican sweep of Oklahoma House districts
returned. Bice became the first Iranian American elected to Congress.
Walter Clark Wilson examines Texas Congressional Districts 21–24 in
Chapter 9. Democrats were optimistic that 2020 could be the year that
they made electoral gains in the Texas delegation. Yet their bid to flip
the state fell flat and appeared particularly anemic in several southern
districts along the Mexican border. Wilson examines why, despite Trump’s
14 S. D. FOREMAN
protectionist and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, he and down ballot

Republican candidates appealed to rather than repelled many Texas and
Tejano voters.
Virginia’s 7th Congressional District is reviewed in Chapter 10 by
Patrick Hickey. Hickey examines how moderate Democrat Abigail Span-
berger, one of 31 Democrats elected in 2018 from districts that also voted
for Trump in 2016, held off a challenge from state legislator Nick Freitas.
Spanberger’s win against the backdrop of the district’s political history
and Republican partisanship advantages suggested that her 2018 victory
was not merely a fluke in a non-presidential election year, and signals that
Virginia’s 7th district is trending toward the Democratic Party during
the Trump era. Virginia’s 7th may be a bellwether and swing district in
coming elections.
Senate case studies are the focus of Part III. Alabama is covered in
Chapter 11. Tom Lansford examines the dynamics of the Republican
Senate primary in this deep-red, Republican bastion. While Democrat
Doug Jones won a special election in 2017, he was the first Democrat to
be elected to a Senate seat from the state since 1986 and was viewed as
the most vulnerable Senate incumbent in 2020. The campaign was essen-
tially decided in the primary between former Senator and U.S. Attorney
General Jeff Sessions and political novice and popular former football
coach Tommy Tuberville in a race where Trump loomed large. Buoyed
by Trump’s support Tuberville won the primary and easily defeated Jones
to win the seat. In Chapter 12, Gina Woodall analyzes the lone Repub-
lican Senate seat Democrats managed to flip in November in Arizona.
Former astronaut Mark Kelly had ‘the right stuff’ to oust Martha McSally
for the Senate seat once held by John McCain. Kelly, a Democrat married
to former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, appealed to young Latinos,
moderate and independent voters, and “soft” Republican women to give
him the edge over McSally.
Douglas M. Brattebo examines Iowa’s Senate race in Chapter 13 and
finds that the Hawkeye state has experienced an acute shift in its political
culture and partisan inclinations during the Trump era. Along with again
voting for Trump, Iowans reelected freshman Republican Senator Joni
Ernst over Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield aided by outside
groups and scorched earth political tactics—contrary to the “Iowa nice”
image of the state. In Chapter 14, Tom Ringenberg provides insight on
the open seat in Kansas created by the retirement of four-term Senator
Pat Roberts. Like several others, this was an expensive and national-
ized race where Democrats and outside interests saw an opening after
statewide and congressional victories in 2018 ended a decade-long elec-
toral drought—even though Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the
Senate since 1932. Despite being significantly outspent, Republican repre-
sentative Roger Marshall cleared a crowded primary election field and
then easily defeated Democrat Barbara Bollier, a former Republican, by a
double-digit margin, continuing a long stretch of Republican dominance
in Kansas Senate elections.
Maine was home to the most endangered of Republican incumbents
in 2020, Susan Collins. Her crucial votes in favor of the confirmation
of Kavanaugh, a pro-life Justice despite her own clear pro-choice views,
and against the nomination of Coney Barrett, which she argued came
too close to an election, were heavily scrutinized during the campaign. In
Chapter 15, William C. Binning details how Collins survived a challenge
from State House Speaker Sara Gideon while walking a tight line on these
issues and others like impeachment. Finally, in Part IV, Wilson explains
some of the lessons learned from the 2020 elections and reflects on how
the roads to Congress will look in 2022 and beyond in Chapter 16
(conclusion) to this volume.
Notes
1. Lindsey McPherson, “Pelosi Elected Speaker, Likely for the Last Time,”
Roll Call, January 3, 2021.
2. Max Greenwood, “100 Days: Democrats See Clear Path to Senate
Majority,” The Hill , July 26, 2010, https://thehill.com/homenews/sen
ate/508965-democrats-see-clear-path-to-senate-majority.
3. Pew Research Center, “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even
Wider,” October 5, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/
10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider/.
4. United States House of Representatives elections, 2020—Ballotpedia.
5. Julia Manchester, “How Markey Took Down a Kennedy,” The Hill ,
September 1, 2020. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/514702-
how-markey-took-down-a-kennedy.
6. Clare Foran and Gregory Krieg, “AOC Throws Weight Behind 7 Progres-
sive Women Candidates with Endorsements,” CNN.com, February 21,
2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cor
tez-pac/index.html.
16 S. D. FOREMAN
7. Stephanie Akin, “Rep. Denver Riggleman Blames Fraud at GOP Conven-

tion After Losing Nod for Second Term,” Roll Call, June 14, 2020. GOP
Rep. Denver Riggleman denied nomination for second term (rollcall.com).
CHAPTER 2
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

on the 2020 Elections
Christopher J. Galdieri, Jennifer C. Lucas, and Tauna S. Sisco
The novel coronavirus upended nearly every aspect of American life in

2020, from schools to work to dating to parenting to shopping. Politics
was not spared this impact, but politics is distinct from other areas of life
precisely because politics is about our collective response to crises and
challenges—and our determination of where we draw the line between
social goods and individual freedoms. We have seen throughout the
pandemic a clash between individual beliefs and circumstances and what
produces the best outcomes for society as a whole. We have also seen how
candidates and election administrators struggled to adapt to a new reality
that made many of the standard techniques of running for Congress and
running elections dangerous or impractical. In this chapter, we examine
how the coronavirus intersected with existing aspects of the American
political system—particularly partisan polarization and the federal struc-
ture of American election administration—to complicate both running for
office and running elections in 2020.
C. J. Galdieri (B) · J. C. Lucas · T. S. Sisco

Saint Anselm College, Manchester, NH, USA
e-mail: cgaldieri@anselm.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2022
S. D. Foreman et al. (eds.), The Roads to Congress 2020,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82521-8_2
18 C. J. GALDIERI ET AL.
Polarization and the Pandemic

Intense partisan polarization is the defining characteristic of American
politics in the early twenty-first century.1,2 This polarization profoundly
affected federal and state responses to the pandemic, citizens’ assessments
of the seriousness of the virus, and state efforts to conduct elections
while minimizing the risk to citizens. Had the executive branch been
led by a president who recognized and deferred to the expertise of
public health officials and the agencies they led, there could have been
a unified message from national leadership to the public that supported
measures such as wearing cloth masks, practicing social distancing, and
avoiding indoor gatherings. Instead, the Trump administration treated
the pandemic largely as a public relations problem. Trump himself down-
played the urgency of the pandemic throughout 2020,3 touted ineffective
miracle cures,4 and criticized governors who issued stay-at-home orders.5
He refused to wear a mask except in rare circumstances6 and complained
when those around him did.7
Trump resumed his campaign rallies in June. While his first event in
Tulsa was poorly attended,8 by the fall, he was holding one rally after
another, day after day, with little regard for recommended pandemic
protocols. On October 26, Trump followed up three rallies in Penn-
sylvania with a maskless public swearing-in of newly confirmed Supreme
Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the White House balcony.9 After
contracting coronavirus himself, he declared himself immune to further
infection and urged Americans not to let COVID-19 “dominate your
life” while promising that Americans who contracted it were “going to
beat it.”10
As the leader of the Republican Party, Trump’s words and actions
carried particular weight with party identifiers and gave any Republican
who wanted to disregard public health recommendations a pretext for
doing so. Throughout 2020, surveys and other research indicated that
Republicans were less likely to take the pandemic seriously, less likely
to wear masks and practice social distancing, and followed news about
the pandemic less closely.11,12,13 This dynamic put pressure on Repub-
lican candidates and elected officials to follow Trump’s lead, rather than
the advice of health officials; Republican governors were slower and less
likely to require citizens to stay at home during the early days of the
pandemic.14 While Republican candidates were less willing to take public
health precautions, many Democrats took them to heart and campaigned
2 THE IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON THE 2020 ELECTIONS 19
cautiously, even to the point of making decisions about campaign tactics

that may have contributed to Democrats’ unexpected losses in the House
of Representatives and underperformance in Senate races.15
Running Amid the Coronavirus

Social distancing, masking, and the avoidance of large gatherings are
tough to reconcile with traditional forms of campaign activity. One of the
most significant impacts of the coronavirus was that it limited in-person
campaigning. Under more normal circumstances, parties and candidates
turn voters out by mobilizing them through a ground game which
typically includes field offices with staff who can organize volunteers,
get people registered, give them information, remind them to vote and
where their polling place is, and run get-out-the-vote operations.16 But
the coronavirus upended these standard procedures. Simply being in a
crowded office with other campaign staff became a health risk, as did
knocking on a voter’s door to encourage them to turn out. Campaigns
that took social distancing seriously had to move to virtual offices and
find alternatives to in-person campaigning and outreach. In some ways
it made sense not to campaign in person: 63% of voters reported being
uncomfortable with canvassers knocking on their door.17
But the reluctance to open the door to a campaign worker was not
distributed evenly throughout the population, and not all campaigns
followed coronavirus precautions equally. Some Republican candidates
appeared to disregard them entirely, while many Democrats minimized
traditional campaign activity. A Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee (DCCC) memo reminded candidates that the concerns of
the pandemic should be “front of mind.”18 In the final weeks of North
Carolina’s United States Senate race, for example, incumbent Repub-
lican Thom Tillis maintained a busy schedule of events throughout the
state, often with high-profile surrogates, and appeared onstage with
Donald Trump at several rallies. But for the fact that some attendees
wore masks, these events were no different than what one would have
seen in a pre-pandemic campaign. By contrast, the Democratic candi-
date, Cal Cunningham, held few events, none of which had large crowds,
and his campaign did little to publicize them until after they had taken
place.19 Some Republicans ignored local public health precautions, as
when Tommy Tuberville, the Republican candidate for the Senate in
Alabama, came to Washington, DC for fundraising and disregarded the

federal district’s 14-day quarantine policy.20
Many candidates tried to reinvent their campaigns by moving them
online. This was a challenging effort. Virtual events require people to
take active steps to seek them out online and dedicate personal time to
them, rather than taking a few minutes to respond to a knock at the
door.21 As Zoom fatigue quickly settled in for Americans working from
home, the prospect of sitting in front of the computer for another hour
at night to hear a candidate speak was not always an inviting one. Some
candidates got creative to make attending virtual events more appealing.
Melissa Romano, a candidate for school superintendent in Montana, held
online story times for children to give their parents a break. Other candi-
dates for Congress used virtual town halls to discuss ways to stay healthy
or answer questions about the virus. For incumbents seeking re-election,
this sort of engagement was an opportunity to display apolitical adver-
tising activity and policy expertise. Others hosted social events like wine
tastings or mask sew-alongs to encourage people to drop in virtually.22
These events required candidates to remain mindful of what they said.
When Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) was recorded criticizing the president
on a constituent call, it briefly became a huge media story.23
One innovation, largely limited to Democratic campaigns, was the use
of celebrities in online events. Most of these took the form of online
reunions of beloved pop culture figures, such as the casts of movies
like The Princess Bride, whose read-through of the film’s script raised
$4.25 million for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and television shows
like Parks and Recreation,Happy Days , and Veep.24 Celebrities have been
involved in political campaigns for as long as there have been celebrities;
movie stars of the day campaigned for Warren Harding and James Cox
in 1920.25 The move online, however, amplified celebrities’ star power.
Instead of speaking to a relatively small number of people at an in-person
event, they were able to reach much larger audiences and attract those
who might not otherwise have been interested in an online campaign
event.
Moving campaign events online was as much about protecting the
health of candidates as it was about protecting the health of voters. As the
pandemic spread, multiple candidates found themselves having to isolate
themselves after testing positive or being exposed to someone who had
the coronavirus. In Georgia, Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate for
that state’s full-term United States Senate seat, had to isolate after his
wife tested positive in July.26 Just before the runoff election in January,
Republican David Perdue had to do the same. This probably did not cost
him the election, but it did him no favors in the home stretch of his losing
campaign against Ossoff.27
While that Georgia race saw both candidates quarantine themselves, in
other races coronavirus precautions became a point of contention. This
was particularly so in South Carolina’s Senate race, where incumbent
Republican Lindsey Graham faced Democratic challenger Jamie Harrison.
Harrison, who has diabetes, moved his campaign almost completely
online to minimize his risk of contracting the coronavirus. When Harrison
insisted that Graham be tested for the coronavirus before the scheduled
second debate of the campaign, Graham refused; Harrison then refused to
debate. Instead, the candidates had back-to-back televised town halls.28,29
It is difficult to see Graham’s refusal to test as anything other than an
effort to be on the right side, in partisan terms, of the pandemic; Graham
was signaling to Trump and to Republican voters that he was one of them.
And as an added bonus he avoided the debate without sacrificing air time,
which was a good outcome for a rattled incumbent facing a real challenge
for the first time in decades.
This partisan split also affected the campaign tactics each party’s candi-
dates employed. Democratic candidates and their campaigns for the most
part avoided the sorts of in-person, face-to-face mobilization techniques
that are often the most effective, in the expectation that most voters
would be at best uninterested in talking to a stranger during a pandemic,
and at worst take the approach of a campaign worker as a reason not
to vote for their candidate. Democrats’ unwillingness to approach voters
also meant that they did far less voter registration than they would have
done during a normal presidential election year. Republicans, meanwhile,
did not shy away from canvassing and voter registration, and the Trump
campaign set an ambitious goal of knocking on one million doors each
week.30
Many campaign post-mortems credited this disparity with Republicans’
unexpected success in winning House seats that had gone Democratic in
2018. Donna Shalala, the former Health and Human Services secretary
who won a Florida House seat in 2018 and lost it in 2020, bluntly said
the Democrats’ digital efforts were simply no match for the Republicans’
ground game.31 Texas Democrats similarly concluded that the decision
not to canvass dealt a fatal blow to the party’s efforts to turn out voters
of color, young voters, and rural voters.32 Some of the Democratic candi-
dates who did hold on to their seats credited their decision to canvass
within the framework of pandemic protocols despite the national party’s
turn away from it.33 Given how narrow some Democratic incumbents’
margins of defeat were—Claudia Tenney defeated Anthony Brindisi in
New York’s 22nd District by 109 votes, while Rita Hart lost her bid for
another term representing Iowa’s 2nd District by just six—Democrats will
likely second-guess their decision to avoid face-to-face campaigning.
Democrats’ focus on remote campaigning probably appealed largely
to voters whose demographics—particularly their age, levels of educa-
tional attainment, and income—already made them very likely to vote.
But it left behind voters with a lower propensity to vote who might have
been motivated to turn out by an in-person appeal from a candidate or
volunteer.
While Republicans’ decision to charge ahead as if there were no
pandemic appeared to advantage them, the approach was not without
risk. After the first surge of the virus, from May until Election Day,
34 incumbents released statements saying they were isolating or quaran-
tining because of exposure. Of those 34, 27 were Republicans, including
five members who quarantined after being exposed by Texas Republican
Louie Gohmert (TX-1), and six Republican Senators who quarantined or
tested positive after a White House event for newly approved Supreme
Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett.34
Representative-elect Luke Letlow of Louisiana contracted and died of
the coronavirus just days before his term would have begun; his campaign
itinerary had included multiple events at which masking protocols were
not followed. It is not clear, though, whether he contracted the virus
during his campaign or following the election.35,36 Several newly elected
Republican House members also tested positive during the December
surge, including David Valadao (R-CA) who had a delayed swearing-in
ceremony.37 Michelle Steel (R-CA) also tested positive shortly after a visit
to Georgia to encourage Asian American voters to support Republican
Senate candidates in the runoff election; she then missed the January
6 votes on certifying the Electoral College ballots on the presidential
election.38
Election Administration During a Pandemic

We tend to think of elections as communal events in which neighbors
line up in auditoriums and basketball courts and community centers to
cast their ballots. But these traditions were upended by the contagious
nature of the coronavirus. Of particular concern was the fear that the virus
could be transmitted as easily through contact with surfaces and objects
as through the air. While we now know that the risk of surface transmis-
sion is much lower than initially feared, surface transmission was still of
major concern in spring of 2020 when states were beginning to figure
out how to hold elections safely. Since it is the states who administer
elections, there was no uniform policy throughout the country; different
states made different determinations as to how to alter their election
procedures.
The simplest and most straightforward way to minimize contact with
others during an election is to conduct it through the mail, which Oregon
had been doing exclusively since 1998.39 Even before the pandemic,
several other states, including Colorado, Washington, and Utah, had
shifted the bulk of their voting to mail-in ballots. Others, like Nevada
and Hawaii, joined them in response to the coronavirus.40,41 Others, like
New Hampshire, made emergency allowances for absentee ballots and
temporarily joined the ranks of states with no-excuse absentee voting.42
Some states lengthened early voting periods.
In many respects, these efforts reflected the “flatten the curve” rhetoric
of the early weeks of the pandemic, in which people were urged to take
precautions in order to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with
COVID patients. By voting through the mail or voting early, people could
reduce the stress that election systems would experience from people
voting in person on November 3. All told, temporary expansions of
mail-in voting, combined with established mail-in procedures, gave an
estimated 84% of Americans the option to vote by mail in the general
election.43
Just as basic public health precautions became political controversies
that broke down along party lines, so too did states’ efforts to mitigate
the impact of the coronavirus on election administration. Once again,
Donald Trump played chief instigator. As more and more states loos-
ened mail-in voting restrictions, Trump became a frequent and vocal critic
of the practice. Were these criticisms rooted in fact or logic or a senti-
mental preference for in-person voting, this could have reflected a simple
and honest difference of opinion. But Trump’s critiques hopscotched

from one unfounded conspiracy theory to another throughout the spring,
summer, and fall: Ballots would be sent only to Democrats, or the postal
service could not handle the volume of mail ballots, or foreign countries
would flood mailboxes with phony ballots, and so on.44 Trump’s opposi-
tion to mail balloting created headaches for many Republican candidates
and state parties who feared rank-and-file party members would take
Trump’s words to heart and refuse to vote by mail.45 One survey found
that just 29% of Trump voters were willing to vote by mail, compared to
53% of Biden voters.46 In one extreme display, a group of Republicans in
Michigan—a crucial swing state with a close Senate race—held a public
burning of absentee ballots.47
While many states simply mailed ballots or ballot applications to all
registered voters, others added burdensome steps to the process. Okla-
homa law required citizens voting by mail have their ballots notarized,
but after a court ruled that too restrictive, the state instead required voters
to send photocopies of their identification with their ballots. This limited
mail voting to anyone who had access to either a notary or a copier during
a pandemic in which people were discouraged from unnecessary travel
outside the home.48
While there is little evidence that mail-in voting is subject to mean-
ingful levels of fraud or that it benefits one party over the other, the
system is imperfect.49 The greater number of steps involved in casting
a ballot by mail, compared to voting in person, makes the mail-voting
pipeline leakier.50 Ballot rejections typically affect young and nonwhite
voters disproportionately, and during twenty-three 2020 primaries, more
than half a million mail-in ballots were rejected.51,52 This raised fears
that the 2020 elections might be decided not by voter preferences, but
by voters who were able to successfully navigate their state’s mail-in ballot
requirements.
Those fears appear to have been unfounded. A FiveThirtyEight anal-
ysis found that in 27 states and Washington, DC for which ballot rejection
data was available, overall rates of mail ballot rejection declined from 2016
to 2020 despite the steep increase in the number of mailed ballots in
2020. This was likely because voters heeded widespread messaging about
turning in ballots as soon as possible. Many states made it possible to
submit ballots through means other than putting them in the mail, such
as letting voters place them in secure drop boxes or turning them in
at a county or city clerk’s office.53 However, drop boxes also became
a partisan flash point, as court cases in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas

weighed in on Republican arguments that the number of drop boxes
should be limited.54 Another factor was a general loosening of rules
surrounding absentee ballots; Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled in
late October that election officials could not reject ballots because of a
mismatch in voter signatures.55
In addition to changes in voting by mail, 2020 saw many states
scramble to change the way in-person voting worked in response to
the pandemic. Voters in St. Louis County who faced long lines were
able to change polling places and have a ballot printed for them at the
new polling place. Some states and counties put into place new tech-
nology for sending and tracking mail-in ballots. Some counties already
had fewer polling places due to both budget cuts and an anticipation of
more early voting in person and voting by mail. Many places that often
served as polling places, including schools, senior centers, firehouses, and
similar community spaces, were closed to voters in deference to those who
worked in or used them every day. Elsewhere, officials had to find new
polling places when old ones proved to be insufficiently safe. These new
locations included arenas, fairgrounds, stadiums, and other large spaces.
For example, 23 NBA franchises offered their arenas for voting activities,
including drop-off locations, voter registration, and 18 arenas served as
polling sites.56 Election officials also worked to get the equipment needed
to make polling places as safe as possible, including masks, gloves, and
single-use pens. Others, like Seminole County Florida Elections Super-
visor Chris Anderson, bought Q-Tips and wrapped them in aluminum
foil tape for use as disposable styluses when their budget couldn’t afford
the real thing.57
The coronavirus created a fertile breeding ground for electoral
conspiracy theories. Concerns about possible violence at polling places
spurred official efforts to combat voter intimidation. The Secretary of
State in Michigan issued an order that banned firearms at polling places.58
Other jurisdictions trained poll workers about what would happen in
the event of voter intimidation at the polls.59 One private security firm
claimed it was going to keep an eye on polling places in Minnesota on
Election Day, to “make sure that the antifas don’t try to destroy the
election sites.” Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, declined their
assistance.60
Despite efforts to combat it, voter intimidation occurred, begin-
ning well before Election Day. The 2020 election in some ways was a
perfect storm of disinformation. Absentee ballots, many inexperienced

poll workers, and last-minute changes to the law and polling places meant
that voters needed much more information than they had in previous
elections.
Meanwhile, foreign and domestic actors attempted to discourage
turnout through misinformation campaigns. Common Cause identified
nearly 5,000 reported incidents of disinformation. For example, one
robocall to minority voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois,
and New York warned them that their mailed-in ballots could be used
to track people down for old warrants, to collect on debts, or identify
them for a mandatory vaccination. The FBI and Office of the Director
of National Intelligence claimed that Iran sent emails posing as the
right-wing group the Proud Boys, warning people of retaliation if they
didn’t vote for Trump.61 While secret ballots forestall such actions, such
messages may nonetheless discourage some from voting and serve the
interests of foreign actors seeking to undermine confidence in the security
and legitimacy of American elections.62 In some cases, candidates joined
in sowing misinformation. At least eleven Republican congressional nomi-
nees expressed support for either the QAnon conspiracy theory or its main
tenets. Two won their elections, bringing fringe conspiracies and other
extremist misinformation into the halls of Congress.63
Conclusion
In spite of the many ways the coronavirus complicated the 2020 elec-
tions, voter turnout—estimated by the United States Election Project to
be 66.7% of eligible voters—was the highest recorded since 1900, a year
when the pool of eligible voters excluded women and Black voters in
many states.64 In light of this, some have suggested that concerns about
how to administer the 2020 elections were overblown and “a bit reminis-
cent of the misplaced worries over Y2K.”65 But it was largely because
of worries over the potential impact of the pandemic, and the heroic
efforts of anonymous state and local election officials accompanying those
worries that the 2020 elections were so successful. Though it does not
necessarily follow that turnout was as high as it would have been absent
the virus. Given historically high turnout in the 2018 midterm elections,
it is quite possible that even more voters would have turned out in 2020
had the election taken place under more normal circumstances.
The lingering effects of the coronavirus will extend beyond election

administration. For Democrats who woke up on November 3 expecting
to pick up a dozen or more seats in the House of Representatives and win
an outright majority in the United States Senate, the coronavirus may be a
convenient scapegoat that muddies the party’s efforts to figure out where
it went wrong. For Republicans heading into the 2022 midterm elec-
tions, in which Republicans should have a good chance of winning control
of both houses of Congress, Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the
election—a refusal rooted in large part on the false belief that the extraor-
dinary measures taken to ensure the election was successfully administered
were somehow illegitimate—presents a different conundrum. If rank-
and-file Republican voters continue to view Trump positively, it is quite
possible that being on Trump’s side of the question of who “really” won
in 2020 could become a litmus test in Republican primaries. Any party
in which such an abject denial of reality is necessary for success presents
genuine dangers to democratic governance.
The never-ending drumbeat of false accusations of election fraud and
corruption may also affect Americans’ faith in electoral processes. Those
who supported Trump and believe he lost only because of corrup-
tion and chicanery may come to view democratic elections as a rigged
game and become less likely to vote in the future. A Fox News survey
conducted in December of 2020 provides some support for this prospect.
In that survey, 16% of Republican respondents said that the 2020 election
outcomes would make them less likely to vote in the future, compared to
just 6% of Democrats. And where 84% of Democratic respondents said
the election made them more likely to vote in the future, just 69% of
Republicans said they were more likely to vote. It might be tempting to
write these differences off as a winner’s high or political sour grapes, but
these gaps between partisans’ predictions of their future turnout likeli-
hoods are much larger than those found after previous elections.66 And
thanks to the two runoff elections for Georgia’s United States Senate seats
on January 5, 2021, we have early anecdotal evidence that those predic-
tions hold true. Traditionally, the electorate that turns out in runoffs,
particularly in Georgia, tends to be older, whiter, and more conservative
than the electorate that turns out in general elections. In the Georgia
runoffs, however, Democrats managed to win both elections and narrow
control of the Senate, thanks in part to the composition of the runoff
electorate. Black voters’ turnout dropped less than that of White voters,
while turnout patterns suggest that some strong Trump supporters from
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domestic affairs to regulate, half-a-dozen hungry children to feed,
and a couple of poor relations or so to assist with sympathy, counsel,
and occasional aid, finds no time to dwell upon any one difficulty, no
especial inconvenience from any one burden, because each has its
fellow and its counterpoise elsewhere. It is not only in pharmacy that
the principle of counter-irritation produces beneficial results. A man
with two grievances never pities himself so much as a man with one;
and a man with half-a-dozen treats them all with a good-humoured
indifference little removed from positive satisfaction.
Some people even appear to glory in the multitude of their
afflictions, as though the power to sustain so much ill-luck shed a
certain reflected lustre on themselves. I recollect, long ago, meeting
an old comrade hanging about the recruiting taverns in Westminster.
The man was a clean, smart, active, efficient non-commissioned
officer enough, with the average courage and endurance of the
British dragoon. A year before I had parted with him, languid,
unhappy, and depressed, longing only to return to England but not
yet under orders for home. Now he looked cheerful, contented,
almost radiant. I stopped to inquire after his welfare.
“I landed a fortnight ago, sir,” said he, with something of triumph in
his voice, “and a happy home I found waiting for me! I haven’t a
friend or a relation left in the world. My father’s absconded, my
mother’s dead, my brother-in-law’s ruined, and my sister gone into a
mad-house!”
It sounded melancholy enough, yet I felt convinced the man
reaped some unaccountable consolation from his pre-eminence in
misfortune, admired his own endurance, and was proud of his power
to carry so heavy a weight.
Custom, no doubt, in these as in all other inflictions, will do much
to lighten the load. There is a training of the mind, as of the body, to
bear and to endure. With wear and tear the heart gets hardened like
the muscles, and the feelings become blunted by ill-usage, just as
the skin grows callous on an oarsman’s hands. There is some
shadow of truth in the fallacious story of him who carried a calf every
day till it became a cow. None of us know what we can do till we try;
and there are few but would follow the example of the patient camel,
and refuse to rise from the sand, if they knew how heavy a weight is
to be imposed on them ere they can reach the longed-for diamond of
the desert, gushing and glittering amongst the palms! It is fortunate
for us that the packages are not all piled up at once. Little by little we
accustom ourselves to the labour as we plod sullenly on with the
tinkling caravan, ignorant, till too late to turn back, of the coming
hardships, the endless journey, or the many times that cruel mirage
must disappoint our fainting, thirsting spirits ere we reach the
welcome resting-place where the cool spring bubbles through its
fringe of verdure—where we shall drink our fill of those life-bestowing
waters, and stretch ourselves out at last for long, unbroken slumbers
under the “shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
But the worst method of all in which to carry our load is to build it
up on the pack-saddle so as to attract notice and commiseration
from those who travel alongside. The Turkish hamals, indeed, may
be seen staggering about Constantinople under enormous bales of
merchandise, twice the height and apparently three times the weight
of the herculean bearer; but a Turkish hamal, notwithstanding his
profession, ignores the meaning of a sore back, moral or physical.
Other jades may wince, but, under all circumstances, you may swear
his withers are unwrung. To be sure, the first article of his creed is
resignation. Fatalism lulls him like opium, though, kinder than that
pernicious drug, it leaves no torment of reaction to succeed its
soothing trance. Hard work, hard fare, hard bed, hard words, hard
lines in general, a tropical sun and the atmosphere of a jungle, it is
all in the day’s work with him! Backsheesh he will accept with a smile
if he can get it, or he will do without, consoling himself that it is
kismet, for “There is one God, and Mahomet is His prophet.” With
this philosopher, indeed, “a contented mind is a perpetual feast,”
otherwise how could he sustain his stalwart proportions on a morsel
of black bread and a slice of watermelon? His dissipations, too, are
mild as his daily meals. A screw of weak tobacco, folded in a paper
cigarette, wraps him in a foretaste of his anticipated paradise; a
mouthful of thick, black, bitter coffee stands him in lieu of beer,
porter, half-and-half, early purl, blue ruin, and dog’s-nose. Once a
week, or maybe once a month, he goes to the bath for two hours of
uninterrupted enjoyment, emerging healthy, happy, refreshed, and
clean as a new pin.
Perhaps it is his frugal, temperate life, perhaps it is his calm,
acquiescent disposition, that enables him thus to carry weight so
complacently. He never fights under it, not he! Through the narrow
lanes of Stamboul, across the vibrating wooden bridge of the Golden
Horn, up the filthy stairs, not streets, of Pera, he swings along with
regulated step and snorting groans, delivered in discordant cadence
at each laborious footfall; but he carries his weight, that is the great
point—he carries a great deal of it, and he carries it remarkably well
—an example of humility and patience to the Christian who employs
him, an object of comparison, not much in favour of the latter,
between the votaries of the Crescent and the Cross.
When I protest, however, against making a display and a
grievance of the load you have to bear, I am far from maintaining that
you are to keep it a profound secret, and hide it away in unsuitable
places under your clothes. A man can carry a hundred-weight on his
shoulders with less inconvenience than a few pounds about his
heart. If you doubt this, order cold plum-pudding for luncheon, and
you will be convinced! A secret, too, is always a heavy substance to
take abroad with you, and your own seems to incommode you more
than another’s, probably because you are less indifferent about
letting it fall. As for attempting to dance lightly along with the jaunty
air of an unweighted novice, be assured the effort is not only painful
but ridiculous. No, never be ashamed of your burden, not even
though your own folly should have clapped an additional half-
hundred on the top of it. Get your shoulders well under the heaviest
part, walk as upright as you may, but do not try to swagger; and if
you have a friend who likes you well enough to give his assistance,
let him catch hold at one end, and so between you move on with it
the best way you can.
Some packages grow all the lighter, like a contraband trunk at the
Douane, for being weighed and examined, or, as our neighbours call
it, “pierced and plumbed.” Some again gather increased proportions
when we enlarge upon them; but it is only those of which we dare
not speak, those which no friend must seem to see, for which no
brother must offer a hand, that sink our failing strength, that crush us
down humbled and helpless in the mire. There is but one place for
such burdens as these, and we never lay them there till we have
tried everything else in vain; just as we offer the remnants of a life
from which we expect no more pleasure, where we ought to have
given all the promise and vigour of our youth, or take an aching,
hopeless, worn-out heart back to our only friend, as the crying child
runs to its parent with a broken toy.
“The ox toils through the furrow,

Obedient to the goad;
The patient ass up flinty paths
Plods with its weary load,”
says Macaulay in his glorious Lays of Ancient Rome, and something

in the nature of both these animals fits them especially for the
endurance of labour and the imposition of weight. It is well for a man
when he has a little of the bovine repose of character, a good deal of
the asinine thickness of skin and insensibility to hard usage. Such a
disposition toils on contentedly enough, obedient indeed to the goad
so far as moderately to increase the staid solemnity of his gait,
taking the flinty path and the weary load as necessary conditions of
life, with a serene equanimity for which he has the philosophical
example of the ass! The ways are rough, you know, and the journey
long. Depend upon it these animals arrive at its termination with less
wear and tear, more safety, and even more despatch, than the
sensitive, high-spirited, and courageous horse, wincing from the
lash, springing to the voice, striving, panting, sweating, straining
every muscle to get home.
In the parable of the Ancient Mariner—for is it not indeed the
wildest, dreamiest, and most poetical of parables?—you remember
the hopelessness of the weight he carried when
“Instead of the cross the albatross

About his neck was hung.”
It was not his misfortune, you see, but his crime that bore him down.
Its consciousness lay far heavier on his spirit than did his after-
punishment, when, weary and desolate, he wailed that he was
“Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea,
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.”
The saints, indeed, might not have heard him; how do we know
about that? but he was heard nevertheless, and thus he got rid of his
burden to raise his head once more in the face of heaven.
He looked upon beauty, nature, animate life, the wonders of the
deep, the creatures of his Maker, and “blessed them unaware!”
Enough. The hideous dream vanishes, the unholy spell is broken,
and he cries exulting—
“That self-same moment I could pray,

And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off, and sunk
Like lead into the sea.”
I sometimes think that women bear their burdens with less

apparent struggle, less toil or complaint than men; and this although
they own more of the horse’s anxious temperament than the
sluggish nature of the ox and the ass. If they have less “nerve” than
ourselves—less of the coolness which springs from constitutional
insensibility to danger—they have more of that mettlesome spirit
which is sometimes called “pluck,” that indomitable courage which
acknowledges no failure for defeat, which never sleeps upon its post,
which can bear up bravely even against the sickness and depression
of unremitting pain. It is proverbial that in all phases of mere bodily
suffering they show twice the patience and twice the fortitude of the
stronger sex; while who shall say how much of silent sorrow they can
cherish and conceal in troubled hearts while they go about their daily
business with smiles on their gentle faces, with a tranquil, staid
demeanour seeming to chant in soft, harmonious cadence the
watchword of “All’s Well!”
Do you not think they too keep their favourite skeletons (far less
perfect than yourself) hoarded, hidden away, locked up, but not to be
buried or forgotten for the worth of kingdoms? Do you suppose they
never bring them out to be hugged, and fondled, and worshipped,
and wept over?
“In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
Bah! It is a world of shams. If a woman is not a hypocrite she must

be a stone!
We should give them greater credit though could we learn more of
the weights they have to carry. But their training is known only to
themselves; their trials come off in secret; the saddles they wear are
jealously locked up, and they take care to keep the key! I think the
reason they run so kindly is that they apply themselves very
frequently to the last resource of the Ancient Mariner when he saw
no escape from his punishment, when he was overweighted with his
curse.
I know not: I only know that the quiet courage, the generous spirit,
the untiring endurance with which they perform the journey of life is
too generally ignored, unappreciated, and thrown away. How often
have we not seen a thorough-bred horse ridden by a butcher? a
being little lower than an angel submitting, gentle and patient, to a
creature little higher than a brute.
CHAPTER XI
SHADOWS
“Coming events cast their shadows before,” says a favourite adage

of that proverbial philosophy which is often so quaint and truthful,
sometimes so contradictory and far-fetched. In the present instance
the maxim, I think, is contradicted by our individual convictions and
general experience. For my own part I protest I am no believer in
presentiments. That is a beautiful fiction of poetry, completely
unsubstantiated by the prosaic events of life, which represents the
predestined sufferer as one who
“Still treads the shadow of his foe,”
while the arm of the avenger, uplifted though unseen, intercepts the
light of heaven ere yet its blow descends. Poets, no doubt, lay their
foundations on a basis of truth, but, as befits their profession, do not
scruple to raise a superstructure in magnificent disproportion to the
limits of their ground-plan. I will appeal to nine people out of every
ten whose lot it has been to sustain severe affliction—and I think it is
nearly nine-tenths of the human race—whether they have not found
themselves staggered or prostrated by blows as sudden as they
were overwhelming; whether the dagger has not always been a
more deadly weapon than the sword, the marksman behind the
hedge a more fatal enemy than the battery on its eminence, the
hidden reef a worse disaster than the adverse gale, and whether
their hopes, their happiness, or their fortunes, have not failed them at
the very moment when the false waves smiled serenely at the calm
skies overhead—
“Like ships that on a summer sea

Have gone down sailing tranquilly.”
No; these forthcoming shadows need not disturb our repose. They
owe their origin neither to heart nor brain, but proceed from liver, and
I should think must be quite unknown to him who “lives on sixpence
a day and earns it!”
What a life we should lead if we could look an inch before our
noses! Of all curses to humanity the bitterest would be the gift of
foresight. I often think a man’s progress towards his grave is like that
of a sculler labouring up-stream, we will say from Richmond to
Teddington Lock. By taking the established and conventional course
he avoids collision with his kind and proceeds in comparative safety.
By certain side-glances and general knowledge of the river, which
we may compare to the warnings of experience and the reasonings
of analogy, he obtains an inkling, far removed from certainty, of much
approaching trouble to which his back is turned. By observing the
track of his own boat rippling the surface many a yard astern, he
learns to guide his course, just as he would correct his conduct by
the lessons of the past. Now the stream runs hard against him, and
he must work his way foot by foot with honest, unremitting toil. Now
he shoots along through slack water, much to his own content and
self-approval, but under no circumstances, however formidable,
must he completely relax his efforts, for the current would soon float
him back to the place from whence he came. Many a scene of
beauty, many a lovely nook, and sunny lawn, and fairy palace glides
by him as he goes—fading, vanishing, shut out by the intervening
point, to leave but a memory of their attractions, dispelled in turn by
ever-recurring beauties of meadow, wood, and water.
So he plods steadily on, accepting the labour, enjoying the
pleasures of his trip, and nearing with every stroke the haven he is to
reach at last.
However healthy and invigorating the toil, however varied and
delightful the passage, I think he will not be sorry to arrive at
Teddington Lock, there to ship his oars, moor his boat under the
willows, and so, lulled by the murmur of the ever-flowing waters, with
folded arms, upturned face, and eyes wandering drowsily
heavenwards, fall peacefully asleep.
But the shadows which cross our path to our greatest deception
and detriment are those for which we so willingly abandon the
substances whereof they are but the fading phantoms as the dog in
the fable dropped a piece of meat out of his jaws to snatch a like
morsel from the other dog he saw reflected in the water. Every day
men grasp at clouds as did Ixion, bartering eagerly for that which
they know to be illusive, the solid joys and advantages of life. How
many people in the possession of sufficient incomes deprive
themselves of common comfort in an attempt to appear richer and
more liberal than they really are! How many forego the society of
friends in which they find honest pleasure for that of mere
acquaintances with whom they have scarce a thought in common,
because the latter, perhaps themselves sacrificed to the same
illusion, move in a higher and more ostentatious class of society!
With one the shadow is a reputation for wealth, with another for
taste. Here it is a house in Belgravia, there a villa on the Thames;
sometimes a position in the county, a seat in parliament, or a
peerage long dormant in a race of squires.
Whatever it may be, the pursuer follows it at the best speed he
can command, finding, usually, that the faster he goes the faster it
flies before him; and when he comes up with it at last to enfold the
phantom in his longing embrace, behold it crumbles away to
disappointment in his very arms.
I have seen Cerito dancing her famous shadow-dance; I have
watched a child following its own retreating figure, lengthened to
gigantic proportions in an afternoon sun, with shouts of wonder and
delight; I once observed, perhaps the prettiest sight of the three, a
thorough-bred foal gallop up to some park-palings, to wince and
scour away from the distorted representation of a race-horse it met
there, in the wild, graceful freedom of a yet unbridled youth; and I
have thought of the many shadows that lure us all, between the
cradle and the grave, only to impose on us in their fullest signification
the different sentiments of disbelief, dis-illusion, and disgust. When
Peter Schlemihl made his ill-advised bargain with the devil, that
shrewd purchaser quietly rolled up his victim’s shadow and put it in
his own pocket. When Michael Scott, in the completion of his
education at Padua, had mastered certain intricacies of the black art,
his fellow-students observed to their consternation that while they
walked in the college gardens with the wise north-countryman,
“His form no darkening shadow cast

Athwart the sunny wall.”
The first step in supernatural learning, the first condition for the
attainment of superhuman power, seems to have been the dismissal
of so inconvenient and unmeaning an appurtenance as a shadow.
How many people have I known, and these not the least
endearing and capable of their kind, over whose whole life the
shadow of a memory, though growing fainter day by day, has yet
been dark enough to throw a gloom that the warmest rays of
friendship and affection were powerless to dispel! Sometimes,
indeed, that darkness seems dearer to them than the glories of the
outer world; sometimes, and this is the hardest fate of all, they cling
to it the closer that they feel the illusion has been to them a more
reliable possession than the reality. There is a world of tender
longing, bitter experience, and sad, suggestive pathos in Owen
Meredith’s lament—
“How many a night ’neath her window have I walked in the wind and the
rain,
Only to look on her shadow fleet over the lighted pane!
Alas! ’twas the shadow that rested—’twas herself that fleeted, you see—
And now I am dying—I know it! Dying—and where is she?”
The shadow he had worshipped so fondly was not more fleeting than
the dream on which he had anchored a man’s honest hopes, and
wasted a man’s generous, unsuspecting heart.
Then we see our shadows at points of view so peculiar to
ourselves, in lights that so distort and disguise their proportions, it is
no wonder if for us they become phantoms of formidable magnitude
and overpowering aspect. The demon of the Hartz Mountains is said
to be nothing more than the reflection or shadow of the traveller’s
own person, as seen under certain abnormal conditions of refraction
against a morning or evening sky. Such demons most of us keep of
our own, and we take care never to look at them but at the angle
which magnifies them out of all reasonable proportions. When you
see mine and I yours, each of us is surprised at the importance
attached to his spectral illusion by the other. Yours seems to me a
diminutive and contemptible little devil enough; and doubtless,
although you never may have entertained a high opinion of my
mental powers or moral force of character, both are fallen fifty per
cent. in your estimation since you have been brought face to face
with the bugbear by which they are overridden and kept down. If we
could but change shadows we should both of us get back into the
sun. Alas! that all the magic art of Michael Scott himself would fail to
effect such a trick of legerdemain. Alas! that we must bear as best
we can, each for himself, the gloomy presence that makes us so dull
of cheer, so sad of countenance, and so cold about the heart.
Men adopt a great many different methods to get rid of their
respective shadows, approximating more or less to the conclusive
plan of Peter Schlemihl aforesaid, who sold his outright to the devil.
Some try to lose it amongst a crowd of fellow-creatures, all with the
same familiar attendants of their own; others struggle with it in
solitude, and find themselves halting and maimed after the conflict,
like him who wrestled of old with the angel at Penuel “until the
breaking of the day.” One thinks to stifle his tormentor in business,
another to lull him with pleasure, a third to drown him in wine. None
of these remedies seem to answer the purpose desired. Blue-books,
bankers’ books, betting-books are unable to break the spell; over the
pages of each he throws the all-pervading gloom. Neither is he to be
worsted by the gleam of many candles flashing only less brightly
than the sparkle of Beauty’s jewels and the lustre of her soft eyes in
“halls of dazzling light.” On the contrary, it is here that, maybe from
the force of contrast, he asserts his power with the greatest
determination, coming out, as is but natural, under the vivid glare
thrown on him in a stronger and more uncompromising relief. To
steep him in wine is often but to increase his dimensions out of all
reasonable proportions, and at best only gets rid of him for a night
that he may return in the morning refreshed and invigorated to
vindicate his sovereignty over the enfeebled rebel he controls. There
are means of dispelling the darkness, no doubt, but I fear they are
not to be found in the resources of study, certainly not in the
distractions of dissipation nor the feverish delirium of vice. It must be
a warm, genial, and unusually generous disposition which is not
warped and dwarfed by a shadow cast upon it in youth, or indeed at
any period of life; but for animate as for inanimate nature there are
black frosts as well as white. The latter evaporate with the morning
sun in light wreaths of vapour and perhaps a few tears sparkling like
diamonds, to be succeeded by brilliant sunshine, unclouded till the
close of its short winter’s day; the former, grim, grey, and lowering,
parch and wither up the life of every green thing, drawing her shroud,
as it were, over the cold dead face of earth ere she is buried in the
darkness of approaching night.
It is hard upon youth to see its rosy morning overcast by the
shadow; but it has many hours yet to look forward to before noon,
and can afford to wait for brighter weather. Far more cruelly does
age feel the withdrawal of that light it had trusted in to cheer its
declining day; a light it can never hope to welcome again, because
long ere the shadow shall be withdrawn from the chilled and weary
frame, its sun will have gone down for ever into the ocean of eternity.
People talk a great deal about that physical impossibility which
they are pleased to term “a broken heart”; and the sufferer who
claims their sympathy under such an abnormal affliction is invariably
a young person of the gentler sex. I have no doubt in my own mind,
nevertheless, that a severe blow to the fortunes, the self-esteem, the
health or the affections, is far more severely felt after forty than
before thirty; and yet who ever heard of an elderly gentleman
breaking his heart? Any thing else you please—his word, his head,
his waistcoat-strings, or even his neck, but his heart! Why, the
assumption is ludicrous. If you consult the statistics of suicide,
however, you will be surprised to find in how many instances this
most reckless of crimes is committed by persons of mature age,
though it is strange that those whose span in the course of nature is
likely to be so short should think it worth while to curtail it with their
own hand. There is another shadow, too, which, apart from all finer
feelings of the heart or intellect, has a pernicious effect on our
interests and welfare. It is cast by our own opaque substances when
we persist in an inconvenient attitude, commonly called “standing in
our own light.” Parents and guardians, those who have the care of
young people, generally are well aware of its irritating persistency
and disagreeable consequences. It is provoking to find all your
efforts thwarted by the very person on whose behalf they are made.
After much trouble, and the eating of more dirt than you can digest in
comfort, you obtain for a lad a high stool in a counting-house, an
appointment to the Indian army, or a berth in a Chinese
merchantman, fondly hoping that in one way or another he is
provided for, and off your hands at last. But after a while behold him
back again, like a consignment of damaged goods! He has been too
fast for the clerkship, too idle for the army, not sober enough for the
sea. With a fine chance and everything in his favour, he “stood in his
own light,” and must abide by the gloom he has himself made. Or
perhaps, though this is a rarer case, because women’s perceptions
of their own interest are usually very keen, it is your Blanche, or your
Rose, or your Violet who thus disappoints the magnificent
expectations you have founded on her beauty, her youth, her eyes,
her figure, and her general fascinations. The peer with his
unencumbered estate and his own personal advantages would have
proposed to a certainty, was only waiting for an opportunity—he told
his sister so—when that last ten minutes at croquet with Tom, those
half-dozen extra rounds in the cotillon with Harry, scared this shy bird
from the decoy, and he went off to Melton in disgust. Rose, Blanche,
or Violet “stood in her own light,” and must be content for the rest of
her career to burn tallow instead of wax.
The shadows, however, which ladies preserve for their own private
annoyance cast surprisingly little gloom over their pretty persons
while they are before the world. A new dress, a coming ball, a race-
meeting, or a picnic, are sufficient to dispel them at a moment’s
notice; and though doubtless when these palliatives are exhausted,
when they put their candles out at night, the darkness gathers all the
thicker for its lucid interval of distraction, it is always something to
have got rid of it even for an hour.
That women feel very keenly, nobody who knows anything about
them can doubt. That they feel very deeply is a different question
altogether. In some rare instances they may indeed be found, when
the light they love is quenched, to sit by preference in darkness for
evermore; but as a general rule the feminine organisation is
thoroughly appreciative of the present, somewhat forgetful of the
past, and exceedingly reckless of the future.
For both sexes, however, there must in their course through life be
shadows deep in proportion to the brilliancy of the sunshine in which
they bask. “Shall we receive good at the hand of God,” says Job,
“and shall we not receive evil?” thereby condensing into one pithy
sentence perhaps the profoundest system of philosophy ever yet
submitted to mankind. The evil always seems to us greater than the
good, the shadows more universal than the sunshine; but with how
little reason we need only reflect for a moment to satisfy ourselves.
There is a gleam in which we often fondly hope to dispel our
shadows, delusive as the “will-o’-the-wisp,” a light “that never yet
was seen on sea or shore,” which is cruelly apt to lure us on reefs
and quicksands, to guide us only to eventual shipwreck; but there is
also a glimmer, faint and feeble here, yet capable of dispelling the
darkest shadows that ever cross our path, which if we will only follow
it truthfully and persistently for a very brief journey, shall cheer us
heartily and guide us steadfastly till it widens and brightens into the
glory of eternal day.
CHAPTER XII
GUINEVERE
Amongst all the works of our great poet, works in which criticism,
searching diligently for flaws, discovers every day new beauties,
surely this noble poem is the very crown and masterpiece.
Compared even with the productions of his own genius, Guinevere
always seems to me like a statue in the midst of oil-paintings. So
lofty is it in conception, so grand in treatment, so fair, so noble, so
elevating, and yet so real. As the Californian digger in his “prospect”
washes, and sifts, and searches, till from a mass of rubbish and
impurities he separates the nugget of virgin ore, so from the lavish
confusion of rich material to be found in that collection of early
romance called La Morte d’Arthur, the Laureate has wrought out a
poem precious in its own intrinsic merit as the purest metal that was
ever beaten into a crown of gold. One other has been over the same
ground before him, the great magician who with a wave of his wand
has created for us gleaming blade and glittering hauberk, mail and
plate, and managed steeds caparisoned, lances shivered to the
grasp, sweet pale faces looking down on the mimic war beneath,
and all the pomp, panoply, and prestige of an ideal chivalry, when
“The champions, armed in martial sort,

Have thronged into the list,
And but three knights of Arthur’s court
Are from the tourney missed.
And still those lovers’ fame survives
For faith so constant shown;
There were two that loved their neighbours’ wives,
And one that loved his own.”
Alas! that the very first of these in arms, in courtesy, in personal

advantages, and, but for the one foul blot, in honourable fame,
should have been Lancelot de Lac, the ornament of chivalry. Alas!
that the lady of his guilty love should have been that
“Flower of all the west and all the world,”
whose rightful place was on the bosom of “the stainless king.”

Their fatal passion, that grew so insensibly in those fair May-days
long ago, when the pair
“Rode under groves that looked a paradise

Of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth,
That seemed the heavens upbreaking thro’ the earth,”
has struck root now, deep, deep in the hearts of both, and spreading
like the deadly upas-tree, has blighted every other sentiment and
affection beneath its shade. There is no happiness for Lancelot
without Guinevere, no sweetness in the breath of evening nor
speculation in the stars of night, no gladness in the summer, no
glamour in the greenwood, no glory in the day. Her whisper lurks in
the hollow of his helmet when he shouts his war-cry, her image
rouses his desire for fame, and points his trusty lance. But for the
keen, unholy stimulant his arm would be nerveless and his courage
dull, while all the time
“The great and guilty love he bare the queen,

In battle with the love he bare his lord,
Hath marred his face, and marked it ere his time.”
Yes, there is retribution even here for the sweet, seductive sin. “The
worm that dieth not, the fire that is not quenched,” begin their work
long ere the cup has been emptied of its tempting poison; and the
one gnaws fiercer, the other burns deeper, in proportion to the
capability of good from which the sinner has fallen—in proportion to
the truth and tenderness of the tortured heart that seems meant for
better things.
And Guinevere. Who can fathom that woman’s anguish, her
shame, her self-reproach, her bitter, hopeless remorse, for whom the
holy plighted love that should have made her shield, her honour, and
her happiness through life, has been pierced, and shattered, and
defiled by that other love which drags her to perdition, and to which
she yet clings closer and closer with a warped instinct of womanly
fidelity for the very sorrow and suffering it entails? The sense of
personal degradation is perhaps the least of her punishment, for it is
her nature when she loves to merge her own identity in another; but
what of her children, if she have any? How can she bear the clear,
guileless faces, the little hands clasped in prayer on her knee, the
loving, trustful eyes of those simple believers to whom she, the
sinner, is in the place of God? Many a woman, hesitating and
hovering on the very brink of ruin, has been withheld by the tiny
clasp of an infant’s hand. If that last chance should have failed her,
such failure has been ever after the heaviest and least endurable of
the penalties she has brought on herself.
But she may be childless, she may be spared the bitter pain of
estrangement from those who are indeed part and parcel of her
being. What, then, of her husband? The man whom once she
believed she loved, who has cherished her, trusted her, given up for
her sake many of the realities and all the illusions of life, whose care
has surrounded her so constantly every day and all day long, that,
like the air she breathes, she can only be made sensible of its
existence when withdrawn, whose indulgence was perhaps so
unvaried as to escape notice, whose affection, expressed by deeds,
not words, she has forgotten because it has not been repeated, like
that other love, in burning whispers every hour. So she not only
strikes him a deadly blow, such as his bitterest enemy would scarce
deal in fair fight, but poisons her weapon besides, and leaves it
sticking in the wound to burn and rankle and fester, that every
passing hand in careless jest or wanton outrage may inflict on him
mortal agony at will. Once, perhaps, she was proud of that brave,
kind face, which she could not imagine blanched by fear nor clouded
with shame. Can she bear to think of it now, quivering at the chance
allusion of every idle tongue, warped into agony, like that of a man
shot through the lungs, when her own name is spoken, purposely or
otherwise, by some impertinent gossip or some rancorous,
ungenerous foe? His sorrow has become a jest; that offence will
soon pass away to make room for fresher scandal. His home is
broken up; he can make himself another. The woman he loved has
left him, yet there are plenty more as fond and fair ready to pity and
console; but his trust is broken, and not even in an angel from
heaven can he believe again. This is the worst injury of all. The
strongest, the purest, the noblest of earthly motives to well-doing has
failed him, and from henceforth the man is but a lamp without a light,
a watch without a mainspring, a body without a soul. It is well for him
now if he have some lofty aspiration, some great and generous
object, to lift him out of his depth of sorrow, to rouse him from his
apathy of despair. Thus only can he wrestle with the demon that has
entered into his heart, thus only cast him out and, trampling on him,
so rise to a higher sphere than that from which he has been dragged
down. In self-sacrifice and self-devotion he shall find the talisman to
set him free, not at once, but, like other permanent results, gradually
and in the lapse of time; so, mounting step by step and gaining
strength as he ascends, he shall look down from the unassailable
heights of forgiveness on the lesser souls that can never reach to
wound him now—forgiveness, free, complete, and unconditional as
that which he himself pleads for from his God.
And here it is that the character of Arthur, as drawn by Tennyson,
exemplifies the noblest type of Christianity, chivalry, and manhood
with which we are acquainted in the whole range of fiction. Poetry
has yet to disclose to us a more godlike, more elevating sentiment
than the king’s pardon to his guilty and repentant wife. It breathes
the very essence of all those qualities which humanity, at best “a little
lower than the angels,” is ever striving unsuccessfully to attain.
There is courage, abiding by the award of its own conscience, and
appealing to a higher tribunal than the verdict of its kind; there is
contempt for consequences; there is scrupulous, unswerving
persistence in the path of duty, such as constitutes the soldier and
the hero; there is large-hearted, far-seeing benevolence, that weighs
its own crushed happiness and blighted life but as dust in the
balance against the well-being of its fellows. Above all, there is that
grand trust in a better world and an immortal identity, without which
man, despite his strength of will and pride of intellect, were little
superior to the beasts of the field. Such is the diapason, so to speak,
of this mighty march of feeling—the march of an unconquered spirit
and a kingly soul; while through it all, ever present, though ever
modulated and kept down, runs the wild, mournful accompaniment,
the wail of a kindly, tortured heart, of a love that can never die—
“And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk

Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,
And I should evermore be vext with thee,
In hanging robe—or vacant ornament,
Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair.
For think not, though thou wouldst not love thy lord,
Thy lord has wholly lost his love for thee.
I am not made of such slight elements.
Yet must I leave thee, woman, to thy shame.”
How wonderful, how exhaustive, and how practical seems the

familiarity of great poets with the niceties and workings of the human
heart! It has been said of them, prettily enough, that
“They learn in suffering what they teach in song.”
God forbid! If it were so, their lot would indeed be unenviable; and
what an eternity of torture would such a genius as Byron, or Shelley,
or Tennyson himself have condensed into a single life! No, theirs
must be rather the intuitive knowledge that springs from sympathy
with all things, animate and inanimate, in summer and winter, in light
and darkness, in sorrow and in joy—a sympathy receiving freely as it
gives, and thus cozening them out of nine-tenths of their own private
sorrows, which such finer temperaments as theirs would otherwise
be too sensitive to endure.
The wide scope of this sympathy, the facility with which genius can
handle extreme contrasts of the same passion with equal skill, is, I
think, finely exemplified in the two poems of “Maud” and “Guinevere.”
I have already compared the latter to an exquisite piece of sculpture.
The former seems to me like a wild, fanciful, highly-coloured
painting, in which some true artist has striven to embody the
unattainable conceptions of a dream. Was ever colouring mixed on
palette more vivid and glowing than this description of a lover waiting
for his mistress in her garden—
“There falls a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate;
She is coming—my dove, my dear!
She is coming—my life, my fate!
The red rose cries, She is near—she is near!
The white rose weeps,—She is late!
The larkspur listens,—I hear—I hear!
And the lily whispers,—I wait!”
Is there not in these lines, besides grace, sentiment, pathos,

tenderness, a wealth of pictorial fancy, such as Landseer himself has
not outdone in his magical representation of clown and elves and
stars and flowers grouped round Titania in Fairyland?
As in “clear-faced Arthur” is rendered the ideal dignity of love, so in
Maud’s hapless suitor we find exemplified its mad enthusiasm and
passion. With both, self is unhesitatingly sacrificed to the welfare of
another. When the fatal shot has been fired, and the exile faces a
foreign shore in utter hopelessness that he shall ever look on the
face he loves again, the pity for himself that cannot but chill his
sorrowing heart merges in anxiety and tenderness for Maud. Even
now—perhaps now more than ever—in grief, danger, and privation,
his first thought flies to the idol for whom he has built his life into a
throne, that she may reign there unrivalled and supreme. May his be
the shame, the sorrow, and the suffering!—such is his wild, pathetic
prayer—and let the treasure of his heart go free. If there be danger,
let it lower round his unprotected head. If there be punishment, let
him bear it for both! Ay, though she may never reward him for it,
never even know it; for in this world these two are surely parted not
to meet again. What of that? She is still his queen—his goddess—
his love—the aim of his existence, the darling of his care.
“Comfort her, comfort her, all things good,

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The Roads to Congress 2020:

Campaigning in the Era of Trump and

The Roads to Congress 2018: American Elections in the

Lockdown: Social Harm in the Covid-19 Era 1st Edition

Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics: Growing

COVID-19 and the Future of Higher Education In India

The Environmental Impact of COVID-19 Deepak Rawtani

The Political Economy of Global Responses to COVID-19

Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism in the Age of

COVID-19: The Essentials of Prevention and Treatment

Walter Clark Wilson

ISBN 978-3-030-82520-1 ISBN 978-3-030-82521-8 (eBook)

Cover illustration: © traffic_analyzer/Getty Images

Miami, USA Sean D. Foreman

Sean Foreman acknowledges that without Walt Wilson and Marcia

Part I Congressional Campaign and Election Trends

Part II U.S. House of Representatives Case Studies

6 Florida’s 26th and 27th Congressional Districts: No

Part III U.S. Senate Case Studies

Part IV Roads Ahead

William C. Binning is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at

(2021), and “Money in Politics,” in Divided Union: Structural Challenges

Fig. 3.1 Mail-in ballot percentage by Democratic percentage

Table 1.1 Partisan breakdown of U.S. Senate and U.S. House,

Table 12.1 Fundraising in the 2020 U.S. Senate Race by individual,

Congressional Campaign and Election Trends

The 2020 Elections Overview: A Campaign

Unprecedented Campaign Year

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

Congress Stands Divided

Year Senate House

2008 57 41 2 +8 D 257 178 +24 D

Throughout Trump’s term in office, Republicans maintained the

What’s Good for the Goose…?

2018. After a contentious confirmation process, Brett Kavanaugh, a

(D-MA7) defeated long-term incumbents, Democrats witnessed contests

not universally successful. For example, conservative Democrat Henry

Sizing Up the 2020 Elections

Breaking Down the Roads to Congress 2020

Chapter 3 examines the impact of vote by mail during the pandemic.

protectionist and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, he and down ballot

7. Stephanie Akin, “Rep. Denver Riggleman Blames Fraud at GOP Conven-

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Christopher J. Galdieri, Jennifer C. Lucas, and Tauna S. Sisco

The novel coronavirus upended nearly every aspect of American life in

C. J. Galdieri (B) · J. C. Lucas · T. S. Sisco

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Polarization and the Pandemic

cautiously, even to the point of making decisions about campaign tactics

Running Amid the Coronavirus

Alabama, came to Washington, DC for fundraising and disregarded the

Election Administration During a Pandemic

and honest difference of opinion. But Trump’s critiques hopscotched

a partisan flash point, as court cases in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas

perfect storm of disinformation. Absentee ballots, many inexperienced

The lingering effects of the coronavirus will extend beyond election

“The ox toils through the furrow,

says Macaulay in his glorious Lays of Ancient Rome, and something

“Instead of the cross the albatross

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,

“That self-same moment I could pray,

I sometimes think that women bear their burdens with less

Bah! It is a world of shams. If a woman is not a hypocrite she must