This research note replicates and extends Allamong's analysis of political alienation and Trump support using the 2024 ANES. We distinguish inefficacy, the belief that one has little influence over politics, from cynicism, distrust of government officials and institutions. Allamong found that cynicism predicted turnout and Trump support in 2016 but not in 2020. We show that this association did not reemerge in 2024, even though Trump was running as an "outsider" non-incumbent again. In multinomial models, cynicism is negatively associated with voting for either major-party candidate relative to abstention, including Trump. Descriptive evidence from open-ended responses further suggests that references to Trump as a political outsider declined from 2016 to 2024. The results indicate that outsider appeals may have limited durability once an outsider candidate becomes a central figure in the political system, even if they temporarily exit from the system for a time.
This article provides an overview of how our two most recent presidents have reshaped a once underused and underappreciated presidential power. Before providing a comprehensive look at President Joe Biden's federal executive clemency record, I consider the state of the president's pardon power immediately before and after the Biden administration. While most of Biden's clemency record was "traditional," including his decision to abuse the clemency power during his "lame duck" period, he also made several "Trumpian" clemency decisions near the end of his term. In this article, I provide context for Biden's "Trumpian" clemency decisions by looking at President Donald Trump's first term record on clemency. Next, I offer a look at President Biden's clemency decisions, arguing that they were frequently "traditional" but later on were sometimes "Trumpian." I then discuss why President Biden's clemency record, bookended at each end by clemency abuses from President Trump, may be consequential to how future presidents view their clemency power.
Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency 3 days after the August 5, 1974 release of the "smoking gun" tape, which recorded Nixon conspiring to obstruct the Watergate investigation. While historians agree that Congress would have removed Nixon from office after the smoking gun, his chances beforehand are still debated. We simulate Nixon's chances by multiply imputing House and Senate votes on three articles of impeachment, building our imputation model from votes cast by the House Judiciary Committee before the smoking gun. Results suggest approximately a 95 percent chance that the President would have impeached and convicted for obstruction of justice and a 89 percent chance of conviction for abuse of power. Nixon's outlook was bleak even before the smoking gun.
This article reconsiders the strained relationship between President George H. W. Bush and the American Jewish community during the early 1990s, focusing on the controversy surrounding Israel's request for US loan guarantees and Bush's September 1991 "lonely little guy" remark. Contrary to prevailing scholarly portrayals that emphasize presidential hostility or anger, it argues that the depth of Jewish outrage cannot be explained by policy disagreement alone. The article shows that American Jews interpreted Bush's remarks through a historically embedded sensitivity to accusations of dual loyalty. The reaction was shaped less by the president's intentions or actions than by a long-standing Jewish fear of political delegitimation, intensified by the linkage of humanitarian aid to Israeli settlement policy. By situating the episode within the broader history of American Jewish political identity, the article highlights how historical memory mediated contemporary political conflict and magnified its consequences, including the sharp erosion of Jewish support for Bush in the 1992 election.
This article examines the Republican Party's campaign in the South in 1948. It argues that many national and state Republicans believed that there was a real opportunity for the party's presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, to win Border South states. Dewey and other influential national Republicans also expressed interest in boosting the party's fortunes in the region and made efforts-which they had not in 1944-to cultivate southern Republicanism's growth. Optimistic about the party's prospects but wary of the potential risks associated with personal excursions into the South, Dewey sent Republican National Committee chair Hugh Scott and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio into the region on his behalf. There, as this article argues, they honed a pro-states' rights message with a non-racial veneer to capitalize on President Harry S. Truman's unpopularity and foster Democratic defections without jeopardizing Dewey's support outside of the former Confederacy. Though Dewey performed poorly in the South in 1948, this article reveals a serious and at times thoughtful Republican engagement with the region that year, thereby complicating discussions of Dwight D. Eisenhower's success in 1952. This article demonstrates that Eisenhower was not the first to pinpoint Republican opportunity in the postwar South and argues that the basic outlines of his rhetorical appeals were in fact formulated by Republicans at least 4 years earlier. This encourages a reassessment of conventional scholarly periodizations in the study of southern Republicanism, which focus on the later twentieth century, and the development of a longer-term framework for understanding the party's success in Dixie.
This article presents the findings of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey. which aimed to rank presidential greatness from George Washington to Joe Biden. Respondents rated each president revealing notable trends in historical rankings. Abraham Lincoln topped the list with an average rating of 95.03, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt (90.83) and George Washington (90.32). In contrast, Donald Trump received the lowest score at 10.92. Changes in rankings from previous surveys highlight shifts in perceptions, particularly with Barack Obama rising from 16th to 7th. Partisan analysis revealed interesting dynamics, with Republicans and conservatives favoring Washington, while Democrats showed more favorable ratings for Obama. The survey also identified Donald Trump as the most polarizing president, while George Washington emerged as the least polarizing. Additionally, respondents characterized Jimmy Carter as the most underrated president and John F. Kennedy as the most overrated. These findings contribute to the ongoing discourse on presidential evaluations in a polarized political climate.
This paper introduces the concept of presidential extra-territorialization-the process whereby presidents act through or within a foreign jurisdiction in order to achieve a policy goal which implicates the rights commonly held by US citizens or residents. At the heart of presidential extra-territorialization is the practice of jurisdictional arbitrage, which is defined as the strategic leveraging of the differences between legal and political conditions in the United States and a foreign territory. Jurisdictional arbitrage allows the president to evade political or legal constraints that would prevent a president from carrying out an activity on US soil, generally because they infringe upon rights. After developing the concepts of extra-territorialization and jurisdictional arbitrage and exploring empirical and normative aspects of them, the paper discusses three examples covering both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations. The paper also situates its contribution within the literature on executive agreements, which are the mechanism which enables presidential extra-territorialization.
Despite strong reasons to expect presidents' announced stances on legislation to influence how organized interests lobby Congress, this effect remains underexplored. I advance a theory that Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs), sent by presidents to Congress to convey their positions on legislation, may also send signals to interest groups about when to lobby Congress and which legislators to lobby. To test it, I analyze panel data combining SAPs issued by Clinton to Biden, records of lobbying contact extracted from reports filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and committee and floor agendas in Congress. Analysis of both committee and legislator data shows that SAPs strongly predict whom lobbyists choose to target, and more so than congressional agendas alone can explain. Furthermore, SAPs predict more advocacy specifically by elite lobbying firms. These findings suggest that presidential position-taking may elicit responses not only from Congress but also from organized interests and draw battle lines for both institutional and outside actors.
This article applies a four-dimensional analytical framework to re-evaluate Nelson Mandela's presidency (1994-1999). The framework distinguishes tensions and synergies across four key domains of leadership: executive and symbolic, party and state, international and domestic, and formal versus informal. Mandela, while symbolically powerful and globally revered, was a weak executive leader who delegated core governing responsibilities to his deputy. He failed to challenge the ANC's fusion of party and state, endorsed damaging cadre deployment policies, and presided over informal funding practices that undermined institutional integrity. In foreign affairs, Mandela's human rights rhetoric was inconsistently applied and his party's fundraising strategies conflicted with proclaimed values. Domestically, he missed opportunities for more decisive action on HIV/AIDS and structural inequality, and normalized problematic uses of informal power and patronage. The article concludes that the four-dimensional analysis reveals significant shortcomings in Mandela's exercise of presidential power.
