Straus Dessert Illuminates the Political Workings of America
By Nicholas Perricone ‘26
The Public Issues Board’s Straus Dessert last Tuesday featured Dr. David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College, who shared fascinating and pertinent insights on American politics and often misunderstood aspects of America’s electoral system.
Hopkins began by outlining how the average voter chooses which candidate to vote for. “Most voters are extremely predictable,” he explained, adding that even “the vast majority of independents lean towards one party.” He then addressed the elusive undecided voters, describing the group as the most uneducated sort yet pivotal in determining election results. He went on to say that to sway this powerful and politically disengaged subset of voters, candidates must “meet [these undecided voters] where they’re at,” which unfortunately, means plastering political ads in usually decidedly apolitical places like on social media or at ballgames.
He then segued to the political alignments of liberal, conservative, and moderate, which “twenty percent of voters either do not identify with or [understand].” This confusion might be in part because “many voters choose their party alignment by the social groups they inhabit.” Many people vote based on how their peers—family and friends—vote, peers who are becoming increasingly politically homogeneous as they isolate themselves within groups of the same ideologies.
This political homogeneity is front and center in Hopkins’s book Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Specifically, Hopkins addresses the harrowing ‘diploma divide,’ where white Americans without a college diploma are voting Republican twice the frequency than Democratic, while on the other hand, white college-educated Americans are voting Democratic at a ratio of three to two. This reality reflects a growing class divide influenced by access to resources. This fissure that divides Americans extends to, and is also largely driven by, cultural values and the so-called “culture war,” a catch-all term for hot-button social debates about identity, terminology, and what America means. Dr. Hopkins articulated the fact that realignment (i.e. switching of political allegiances) is “generally part of the culture war,” and that cross-pressured voters—such as socially liberal but fiscally conservative voters—now often opt towards voting based on culture over economics.
Throughout the night, Hopkins touched on a wide range of political issues relevant to American politics too. On modern populism, Hopkins believed that “the message of a lot of populism is that things were better in the past.” He said that this traditionalist push came from the extraordinary rate of cultural change over the past century. On biased news, he expressed that “ultimately, biased news is a market issue,” for biased or unbiased news exists only insofar as there is demand for it. To close off the event, Hopkins encouraged students to “stay interested and informed.”
The event not only demystified current political trends but also left students with a newfound sense of verve. Max Donovan ’25, a co-head of Public Issues Board, noted that there was “lots of valuable information on how our political system works and how polarization functions” and his excitement for the upcoming Straus Desserts to come.