Yesterday evening, the Department of Government and Legal Studies held a discussion titled “Post-Election Teach-In! A Panel Discussion of the Midterm Elections” in Kresge Auditorium. The panel was organized and moderated by Associate Professor of Government Jeffrey Selinger, and included Visiting Assistant Professor of Government Caroline Pippert, Assistant Professor of Government Ángel Saavedra Cisneros and Associate Professor of Government Maron Sorenson. The panelists considered the recent midterm elections, where a “blue wave” of Democratic victories swept the nation.

In an interview with the Orient, Selinger described the teach-in as an effort to organize less formal events for Government and Legal Studies majors and minors. Selinger found that his department, particularly when compared to others, has not historically held informal events for students.

Pippert’s segment of the talk focused on polling, which had underestimated the Republican vote in previous elections and underestimated the Democratic vote in this year’s election. During the recent midterm elections, both general voter and youth voter turnout were the highest since 1914, except for 2018, the only other midterm under a Trump administration.

Pippert attributed this change in voter turnout to a range of factors, including the economy, the job market and U.S. President Donald Trump’s war on Iran. Pippert further noted that even counties and states highly affected by the Supreme Court’s undercutting of the Voting Rights Act still maintained a high voter turnout.

“A particularly strong effort by youth to overcome these challenges to vote would be from North Carolina A&T and University of North Carolina Greensboro students in this most recent election.… They had their polling place removed from campus in 2022. They sued to get it back unsuccessfully. They were able to reinstate it in 2024 for presidential election, but then also had it removed again for 2026.

So they sued again [and] were unsuccessful,” Pippert said. “This prompted students to march to the polls together in protest.… It’s a particularly good example of youth overcoming barriers to still be able to exercise their right to vote.”

Cisneros focused on demographic voter swings, particularly among Latino men. In 2024, a significant percentage of Latino men supported Republican candidates, but this midterm, the demographic swung 32 points toward Democrats.

“One of the reasons could be that our partisanship is not cemented, right?” Cisneros said. “We don’t really know why Latinos would support the Democrats or the Republicans. For Democrats, for a while, it was basically, like, ‘We’re not Republicans, [so] vote for us,’ and then Republicans said, ‘Well, we have a message for some of you.’ And it resonated.”

Cisneros argued that the strongest shifts in the electorate were not about race or religion, but rather partisanship. He noted that what primarily drove people to vote were the economy and governmental abuses of power, compounded by high rates of mobilization, especially in Maine.

“A lot of us really didn’t think too hard about, ‘Oh, what is happening in these flyers?’ But we knew that Donald Trump is very unpopular. Wars are unpopular. The economy’s not working. Apparently, we’re going to get an increase in interest rates soon. That’s part of the mobilization question,” Cisneros said.

Sorenson’s portion of the panel explored potential legal challenges around election results. Because legal challenges are most common when candidates are separated by less than 0.5 percent of votes, Sorenson argued that this midterm would not result in many legal battles.

Sorenson stated that while election law can often be vague or inconsistent, courts generally prioritize maintaining the public’s faith in the electoral process. She also compared the stakes of close or uncalled contests this year with those of highly litigated cases like Bush v. Gore (2000).

“Even though [Mississippi] has a very small margin in the Senate race, they do not have [a] state law that allows any type of official procedure for challenging ballots.… The gist of the reason we’re not seeing an onslaught of legal challenges in the wake of last Tuesday, nine days ago, is because of the margins of victory and because litigation is expensive,” Sorenson said. “Even if the Republican Party, the RNC, might want to dump a bunch of money behind Alaska and Mississippi, they’ve already lost the House and the Senate.… whereas Florida was what determined the outcome of the presidential election.”