Research Spotlight: The Impacts of President Trump’s Midterm Endorsements

It’s not breaking news that President Trump likes to tweet. In 2018, he used that social media platform to dole out a rapid-fire of endorsements of congressional candidates running in the midterm elections. During that campaign, he gave out 134 endorsements to 45 congressional candidates on Twitter, and endorsed another 35 congressional candidates at 47…

Social Science Scholar: Florida Democratic Politics

This past summer, I worked in Florida Democratic politics with the Florida Democratic Party as an intern, Florida College Democrats as the Director of Political Affairs, and FSU College Democrats as President. These positions were all based out of Tallahassee and were centered around organizing Democrats across the state for the elections in 2019, 2020…

Social Science Scholar: Michigan Department of State

My internship and broader experience within the Social Science Scholars program helped me gain a clearer focus on my plans post-graduation. I have decided to use my fourth and final year as an undergraduate at Florida State to fulfill requirements for dual degrees in Political Science and Spanish. I already intended to pursue a graduate degree, but some of my conversations with executive staff during my internship led me to reconsider my program of study, and to shift away from political science and toward data science. My ultimate goal is to work in either state or federal government, or as a researcher at a think tank, and to be able to use both my political science background and my data science skills to craft robust, empirically-derived public policy.

Candidate Entry and Political Polarization

In particular, relative to independent candidates, political parties are even more polarized but yield more efficient elections since the majority party is more likely to win due to vote coordination of its supporters.