ASU Reacts: Election Theories

Every American has their own beliefs, theories, and strategies for predicting the winner of the presidential elections. With the recent re-election of President Barack Obama, many Americans have been contemplating the results; wondering why they came out as they did.

In the article “What Earthquakes Can Teach Us About Elections”, the author, Shankar Vedantam, discusses how the political historian, Allan Lichtman’s, strategy works every time when it comes to presidential elections. Lichtman has tested his theory on previous elections on a time lapse of 120 years. Lichtman states that elections work just like earthquakes, “You either have stability, or you have upheaval.” In elections, if the administration in power was failing, meaning they put the nation into disastrous situations, they were not reelected. However, if the administration was in power and showed success in areas such as the economy and foreign/domestic policies, the people reelected them.

We asked a young adult about her reaction to Allan Lichtman’s theory,

“I agree with Lichtman's theory about how elections work.  My point of view is that if nothing has happened in the country then people assume the president isn’t doing his duty. In result, they compare the presidents to each other when they should be taking a look back at the years and look at what has been done, because I believe the president can only do so much in four years. I also think elections are just presidents competing against each other saying what they can do and what the other cannot do for the country. Citizens should be looking at what the presidential candidates have done for us, and what they have done in the past years not just the yap that they are saying to win the election.”

The reaction of the young adult is a common thought for which many Americans do not review the president’s full term; they often think about the recent events that have taken place. If the president has not done anything amazing within the last year, citizens begin to believe that the president is not being active; not being successful which often turns many voters against him in result, not voting him for re-election.