The Age of Polarization Election Special Part 4: 2016

The Last Best Hope?

The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid, and presidents sometimes won massive landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we examine the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and trace the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today.

In this episode, the election of 2016. The shocking victory of Donald Trump and the final emergence, perhaps, of a new partisan alignment.

Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American Institute

Guests:

Patrick Andelic of the University of Northumbria, author of Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974-1994, now out in paperback

Ursula Hackett, Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State

The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming, go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/events

Producer: Emily Williams.

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