After a nine-hour flight from Buenos Aires to Miami en route to Washington, a delegation of Argentine officials planned to meet with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to sign an agreement adding Argentina to the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). Noem had already signed a statement of intent to explore Argentina’s membership in the VWP. […]
Author: Jack Guan
Judicial Volatility on Section 2 Endangers Minority Representation
In what has taken over the national conversation surrounding next year’s midterm elections, Republicans are redistricting mid-decade to bolster the party’s chances of keeping congressional control. With explicit encouragement from the White House, state lawmakers in Texas and Missouri muscled through new gerrymandered maps that reconfigure Democratic-held districts for presumptive Republican pickups. In the past, […]
A Post-Mortem of the Youth Vote in 2024
This article is a follow-up to an earlier Berkeley Political Review article entitled “Blue Generation: Gen Z and the Democratic Party.” In the 2024 presidential election, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris underperformed President Joe Biden’s vote share in 2020 nationally by three percentage points. Harris’ underperformance is more striking when looking at individual states, even states […]
Overcoming Public Transit’s Fiscal Cliff
Public transit agencies have been facing a “fiscal cliff,” a looming budget shortfall as federal COVID-19 relief expires but transit ridership and fare revenue remain below pre-pandemic levels. According to an American Public Transportation Association (APTA) survey, half of the nation’s public transit agencies are expected to be impacted within the next few years. To […]
Splitting the (Electoral) Vote
Less than two months before the presidential election, Nebraska lawmakers sprang into the national limelight as Republicans sought to change how the state awards its electoral votes. Unlike 48 other states, Nebraska does not award all of its electoral votes in the Electoral College—the body that ultimately elects the president—to the winner of the statewide […]
Playing Politics in America’s Pacific Territories
During the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) declared that America’s tax dollars should no longer be sent to “China, Russia, the Middle East, Guam – whatever, wherever.” However Guam, unlike the other places mentioned in her list, is fully American. For better or for worse, Guam’s American identity is […]
Blue Generation: Gen Z and the Democratic Party
By a two-to-one margin, young voters (between the ages of 18 and 29) backed the Democratic Party in the 2022 midterm elections. This significant split for the Democrats, coupled with the second-highest turnout among the 18-29 age bloc in a midterm election, played an essential role in avoiding an expected and historically-consistent wave of losses […]
On Ranked Choice Voting
In August, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola was projected as the winner of a special election in Alaska to fill the state’s lone congressional district following the death of former Republican congressman Don Young. Peltola beat the odds to win the seat, with pollster FiveThirtyEight forecasting just a 14 percent chance of victory in a state […]