PPE Salon: How Do You Win an Election?
October 17 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
On Thursday, October 17, the PPE program is hosting a salon with Milan Singh. The central question: how do you win an election?
Request your seat HERE.
This question is particularly relevant to students. This fall, North Carolina will be one of the most closely-watched swing states in the nation, with knife’s edge races up and down the ballot. For Donald Trump, North Carolina is all but a must-win state on the road to a second term. However, recent trends may give Kamala Harris a tailwind: from 2016 to 2020, Trump’s winning margin narrowed from just over 173,000 votes to just under 75,000. Whether Josh Stein holds the governorship for Democrats or Mark Robinson cements unified Republican control in Raleigh will have large implications for public policy statewide.
Milan Singh is a Democrat strategist. He has worked on message testing for Blueprint, a pro-Harris polling firm; and for WelcomePAC, which backs moderate Democrats running in light-red House districts. The salon will focus on what research has found matters most to voters, and which messages are most persuasive to those on the fence.
Milan is currently a junior at Yale College studying Economics. He is an Opinion Editor at the Yale Daily News, and the founder and director of the Yale Youth Poll, a new research project using polling to investigate the critical democratic and policy issues that matter to young American voters.”
Required Reading:
- “Most Americans are moderates”: This idea undergirds a lot of my work and I think is the key to figuring out how to win elections. Political elites are almost always very ideological people and there is a strong incentive to talk yourself into thinking that every one else shares your policy preferences deep down. But that just isn’t true! By Milan Singh.
- “Racial Equality Frames and Public Policy Support: Survey Experimental Evidence”: This research relates very directly to how to persuade voters and finds that framing things around race decreases support among all racial groups. By Josh Kalla and Micah English.
- “What Happens When Extremists Win Primaries?”: This is one of the papers cited in Singh’s piece and finds that extreme candidates galvanize the other party and thus suffer an electoral penalty. Hall has some great insights on the drivers of extremism in his book. By Andrew B. Hall.
