By Ethan Cohen
Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect a headline correction on Aug. 27 at 9:16 p.m.
The economy, reproductive rights and war in the Middle East are just a few of the issues driving the looming 2024 Presidential election in a country increasingly divided.
As voters prepare to head to the ballot box in November filled with questions about candidates, key issues and the transformation of the American political system, few recognize and understand this dynamic better than Christopher Burnett.
A seasoned journalist and professor at Cal State Long Beach since 2001, Burnett’s career spans over two decades doing everything from covering the U.S. Supreme Court to working in public and governmental relations.
Burnett, who has his Ph.D. in political science, lays out the important factors driving this next election and highlights the political evolution currently occurring in the United States.
Q: What are the key issues driving the 2024 election?
A: Well, I think a key issue for most people, as in all elections, is going to be the state of the economy, the state of people’s pocketbooks. There has been a lot of inflation. The inflation has slowed in the past year and most recent months, but it’s still not down to the 2% Federal Reserve target, however, it’s running much lower.
I think the two most key issues are probably the economy and inflation, and of course, employment, everything involved in the economic situation for families. Then secondly, the border and immigration.
Q: How has President Biden’s dropping out of the race so late into the cycle affected the Democratic party?
A: I think that President Biden’s dropping out has had the effect of energizing the Democratic Party. Even before the debate, late in June, President Biden was, according to most of the polls, if you can believe the polls, was losing to former President Trump particularly in the key battleground states in the Upper Midwest, Pennsylvania and then across the Sun Belt.
When the debate came along, it looked as if President Biden had some sort of cognitive issue. The party pushed him to resign from his race.
It brought to the fore either an open primary process or selection of Vice President Kamala Harris by the delegates who had voted for President Biden. The Democratic party, in an attempt to keep itself unified and not have a completely open, free-for-all all leading up to the convention, chose to go with Vice President Harris.
Harris, of course, had a very mixed, somewhat negative performance review as vice president, but the party coalescing and uniting behind her has had the effect of energizing parts of the Democratic base that were not energized before.
Q: What strategies are the current candidates using to appeal to younger voters?
A: I know that working with younger people, such as college students, for a long time, they felt that President Biden was not somebody who was particularly clued in to younger people.
Some of the strategies that the Democrats are using, which is a continuation of the Democratic platform, is the cancelation of student debt, which President Biden pursued. There is no reason to think that Vice President Harris would not do the same thing.
Another issue that is being mentioned on the national level is free tuition for state schools. That is another key part of the democratic platform. That’s something that vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Walz, has pushed for. So there’s a big push in the party to appeal to youth… I think that the Democratic Party is working very hard to mobilize college students this fall.
Now former President Trump also hopes to capture the youth vote, more of the youth vote than he had last time. So that will also be part of his campaign.
Overall, the youth vote is not a tremendously significant part of the electorate. Younger people under age 30 do not vote nearly the amount as older people do. However, it’s a key element of the Democratic base, so without young people, it makes it more difficult for the Democrats to win in key swing states
Q: What cultural issues are most prevalent during this election cycle?
A: I think some elements of the Republican Party, but not really Donald Trump in particular, are keyed up on issues like transgender rights which, of course, would not appeal to young people. Younger people tend to be very tolerant of issues of sexual identification and orientation.
Abortion is another key social issue that Democrats have been pushing very hard since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade a couple of years ago. The Democrats have fared very well in states, increasing the turnout by talking about how Republicans, if they got total control of the government, would push for a strong national ban extremely limiting abortion rights.
Now that is kind of a red herring of an issue because the possibility of the Republican Party getting that kind of a majority would be very slim, but nonetheless, a lot of it is that you are trying to mobilize the key elements of the Democratic base which also includes female voters, and so that is something that the Democrats are are pushing as well.
Q: How does the immigration issue factor into this election cycle?
A: Well, the standard Republican response is that the Democrats, under Joe Biden, have let way too many undocumented individuals into the country, and it’s led to increased crime and violence. That it is a tremendous strain, both now and in the future, on national resources.
President Biden, with some Republican support and both parties in Congress, came up with a compromise version of immigration legislation that did not pass this summer. So both sides have been volleying back and forth on who is to blame for that.
Nonetheless, I think you see a very wide section of the American population, who feel that immigration is good, but it’s primarily that most people feel that legal immigration is better than illegal immigration. It’s an issue that’s been around probably since the 60s and 70s. As far as the southern border issue, I think that’s going to continue to be a major issue.
The Democrats do not want to take the blame for the failures of the Biden administration on the immigration process, and the Republicans are going to continue to try to press that. It is going to be one of Donald Trump’s and the Republican’s chief rallying cries.
Q: How are economic conditions influencing campaign promises and voter preferences?
A: There are a lot of people that are being left behind. People who have money in the stock market have been doing much better than people who are living paycheck to paycheck, and so there’s a lot of concern in both parties, portraying the fact that the economy is good. I see that as being a key issue up through the election.
The stock market has been very volatile the last couple of weeks, since the last end of July, beginning of August. There has also been a lot of ups and downs of opinion on how well the Federal Reserve is managing that. The Federal Reserve might be cutting interest rates very soon and that’s something that would be welcomed by the Democrats, because the interest rates would be cut and that might increase borrowing.
It’s very difficult for people to afford homes, particularly in states like California, where prices are high anyway, and so by cutting interest rates, that might help rejuvenate the economy. However, let me just add by this point in August, which is only less than 90 days away from the election, most people’s opinions on the economy have already been baked in, so actions that are going to occur over the next three months are really pretty unlikely to change people’s view on the state of the economy.
This is an issue that strongly favors the Republicans. Most polls indicate that Americans feel that Donald Trump would handle the economy better than the Democratic candidate Harris or President Biden would have so that’s unlikely to change.
Q: With the recent attempted assassination of former President Trump, what do you think about the rise in political violence?
A: It’s been a long time since President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and President Reagan was nearly killed in 1981, so it’s been a long time. It’s been over 40 years since we had a political assassination attempt. So now in 2024 we have former President Trump, who, at the time, was the presumptive Republican candidate, nearly being killed at a rally in Pennsylvania. That has the immediate effect of raising President Trump’s popularity.
I mean he came out of it looking like he was strong, raising up a fist and saying fight, don’t give up and keep going. That created a lot of sympathy for him.
But, you know, the news cycle moves very quickly and although there’s been a lot of concern about the effectiveness of security at that rally in Pennsylvania, the withdrawal of President Biden from the race, the entire situation with Kamala Harris and then now, most recently, all of the vetting of Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, all those, all those things kind of have taken over the public stage.
If you want to include under political violence, violence in the inner cities, people feel less safe, and that creates an atmosphere where… if you go into downtown Los Angeles or downtown Long Beach and you don’t feel safe, that’s something that tends to make people very upset.
One of the issues that’s being raised against Gov. Walz is his response to the 2020 George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, where there was significant looting and burning of the city. People are asking whether he handled that effectively, and a lot of people will say no, he was very permissive…So it’s not just political violence or, you know, attempted assassinations. It’s whether people feel safe.
Q: What foreign policy issues are at the forefront of this election?
A: I think the first issue, and the one that immediately comes to anybody’s mind, is the situation in the Middle East, with Gaza and Israel as well as Israel and Iran with the other border Arab states.
The Democrats, specifically the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, has a much more pro Palestinian policy than the Republicans. Students have shown during the spring in shutting down some college campuses, and there were a number of protests even on our own campus, that it’s one of the issues that has really driven the election.
I think it was one of the factors that led Vice President Harris to pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and not Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who is Jewish, even though their positions aren’t really different on Israel and the prevention of the killing of Palestinian civilians.
I think that students have had a big impact and it will be interesting to see how much the Palestinian issue plays out at the upcoming Democratic Convention.
In addition to that, you have whether or not the war in Ukraine should continue, to what extent U.S. support should continue. Democrats, including Harris presumably, would be much more likely to continue everything from the Biden administration. China is also obviously something that is of concern with Republicans being much more wary of Chinese initiatives than the Democrats are.
We don’t really know at this point how Harris will approach a lot of these international issues. She hasn’t come out with clear positions, but she has indicated somewhat vaguely that she is not in favor of some of the positions.
Clearly, I think she is probably going to be as strong, if not stronger, in favor of Palestinian rights than Joe Biden. That would also make a big contrast between her and Donald Trump, who is very vocal in his support and during his administration of backing Israel.
Q: How do you think that students, many of them voting for the first time, will move forward with the outcome of this election?
A: It’s hard to make a generalization about all students. There are students of all of all ideologies or viewpoints at the university. The most vocal students at the university tend to be the more progressive students, and I think that I would anticipate there will be more activism this fall than there would have been otherwise had Joe Biden been running for a second term. So I think we’re in for an exciting time.
I also think there’s a real desire among a lot of people to have more unity. I think young people have a lot of issues with the fact that they feel like they don’t have the economic advantages that older people have had, and that it is much harder to buy a house, much harder to get started in a career.
I think there’s a desire to move beyond the old, the partisan, the bickering, and get on and make it a better country for everybody. I would like to see students playing a positive role in the future.
Q: What has surprised you the most about this election cycle?
A: I actually thought this was going to be a pretty boring election. I was lamenting the fact because I’ve been involved either in politics, as a reporter, as a political somebody who was working on political campaigns or as a professor since about 1972, I thought this was going to be a very sleepy election with with two near octogenarians running for president, Trump at 78 and Biden at 81.
Trump is still very sharp, he’s very determined in wanting to become president again. This is not a boring election anymore. In fact, it’s a one in a kind election. We’ve never had a presidential candidate like Joe Biden leave the race just a few months before the election with the nomination in the bag. That’s the first time in American history that that’s occurred. We also haven’t had a recent political assassination attempt during an election. So just in the last month, the election has really picked up.
Q: Do you think that there will be an evolution from this election going forward?
A: Yes, I think that this election, at least this is my hope, that this election will be the last one that is fought with candidates in their 70s and even 80s.
I think it’s time to turn leadership over to younger people and I think that, when we get to at least 2028 and 2032 when there are more millennials moving into positions of leadership and the younger generations like Gen Z becoming active, starting careers, I think you’ll see a change in focus of electoral politics.
Public opinion in America is always very fluid, but it tends to evolve. It tends to move forward in a progressive direction over time. I think that in the future, we’re going to see conservatives continuing to yield ground to progressives in American politics.
The process probably will start, if it’s not starting this time in 2024 with the election of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, both of whom are the most liberal or progressive candidates ever to run as a ticket. If you don’t see that take ascent this time, you’re going to see progressive politics become even more significant in the future.
