JR Afternoon with Chris Renwick
Seven Days Later
All right. So yesterday, the Wayne State Department of Political Science had an event. It was called seven days later, and it was the professors talking about the election and what is to come. One of the panelists that was there yesterday is Marjorie Sabah Thompson. She's a professor of political science at Wayne State University and joins me this afternoon. Professor, it's good to have you. Thank you. So tell me a little bit about what the discussion centered on yesterday. Well, there were five of us on the panel, and we each had sort of different themes, things that we tend to specialize in. For example, I study Michigan politics. So I focused on sort of more statewide things like the victory, even though the Democrats did poorly. On November 5th, the state Supreme Court was a big win for Democrats. So I talked a little bit about that and how difficult it is for people to figure out how to vote for the state Supreme Court, one of my colleagues who does religion and politics focused on some of the, the sort of themes for different categories of voters who attend different kinds of churches. One colleague focuses on gender and ethnicity. And it's a fact on our voting behavior. One of our former graduate students who is now a professor down at Bowling Green studies the effect of popular culture and how celebrity endorsements influence elections. And then last but not least, we had a panelist from the School of Medicine, who studies anxiety and stress in, you know, all sorts of things and the tendency for us to kind of fear to motivate us to become tribal almost sure. Yeah, and I think that's been the, the state of our politics for quite some time. It's, it's become very tribal. So what happens next. What, what did the panel settle on. What, where do we go from here. Well, we talked less about where we go from here, but more about who won and who lost. I think, you know, where, where we go will depend on the policies that we see coming out of Washington. But also there at the state level, they're going to be some differences because the house will be in Republican hands, the Senate will remain in Democratic hands and obviously we still have two more years of Governor. Termin office before we have a midterm election. Yeah, it's certainly uncharted waters for for the state here as Republicans take back control of the house. There will need to be more bipartisanship happening in the state of Michigan. If, if laws are indeed to be passed in Lansing and, and at the, the federal level, I think that's, that's true. I think when you hear a lot of the talking Hens talk about the mandate that the American people gave to Donald Trump to carry out a lot of what he talked about on the campaign trail. It's, it's a wait and see. And I, and I think that's a good way to go about it. Professor Marjorie Sabra Thompson, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. We'll take a break. More next.
November 13, 2024 ~ Chris speaks with Wayne State University, Professor of Political Science, Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson. WSU held an event yesterday called 'Seven Days Later' about post-election events and what we can expect going forward.