Guest lecture on US presidential elections

We are glad to announce a guest lecture from Dr. Thomas Schaller from the University of Maryland in the frame of a course “Elections and Political Behaviour”. Dr. Schaller will focus mostly on the US presidential elections, as well as the state of the US political system as a whole. The lecture will take place on Monday, 9 of March at 10:15 in Lossi 36-214, and we welcome everyone interested US politics.

Dr. Thomas F. Schaller is a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He is author of The Stronghold: How Republicans Captured Congress but Surrendered the White House (Yale, 2015), Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (2006, Simon & Schuster), and co-author of Devolution and Black State Legislators: Challenges and Choices in the Twenty-First Century (2006, SUNY Press).

In Whistling Past Dixie, Schaller provides a blueprint for a Democratic majority in the 21st century. Published a month before the 2006 midterms, the book’s forecasts were validated by the Democrats’ capture of majorities at every level of government that election cycle thanks in large part to winning 85 percent of all new congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative seats outside the South. In The Stronghold, he argues that Republicans in the post-Clinton era have emerged as a powerful congressional party, but that the party’s Congress-centric politics have damaged Republican competitiveness in presidential elections.

A former political columnist for the Baltimore Sun, Schaller has published print or online commentaries in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Politico, Salon, The Boston Globe, and The New York Daily News. He has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, The Colbert Report, MSNBC, National Public Radio, The Tavis Smiley Show, and C-SPAN’s BookTV and Washington Journal programs. On behalf of the U.S. State Department, Schaller has delivered lectures on American politics in Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, Finland, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Nepal, Norway, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Now in his twenty-first year at UMBC, Schaller, 52, teaches courses in American government, including the U.S. presidency, interest group behavior, and campaigns & elections. A native of Albany, NY, he lives in Washington, DC.

Guest lecture on Monday, 9 of March at 10:15 in Lossi 36-214

More information: Martin Mölder, Research Fellow in Comparative Politics, [email protected]