Wednesday, May 1, 2019
10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Auditorium
1789 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036

Donald Trump was not the first choice of many conservative Christian voters for the 2016 Republican nomination. However, they strongly backed Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and they remain among Trump’s most ardent supporters. Are conservative Christians, in backing Trump, wagering that his policies are worth the baggage? Or have their priorities fundamentally changed? More broadly, the percentage of Republicans who attend church regularly and who identify as Christian traditionalists is dropping, and the issues that animate Trump’s GOP appear different than those of the 1990s and 2000s. At a time of growing secularization, rising religious pluralism, and identity-based political polarization, has the role of Christianity in the Republican Party fundamentally changed?
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Contested elections decided by narrow margins bring forth the fault lines of election administration and politics. Last November, the Georgia Governor’s race was decided by approximately 50,000 votes out of 3.9 million votes cast. A five-year voter registration eort collided with the Georgia election administration political bureaucracy. There are lawsuits and congressional investigations underway to determine if all the citizens of Georgia were treated fairly and if all their votes counted. The campaigns of both Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp turned a Governor’s race into the equivalent of a presidential election. SPA Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, Bill Sweeney walked us through the details of registering, voting and counting in Georgia.

2018 Georgia Governor Race Presentation

The Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies is pleased to announce Emily D. Bello-Pardo as the 2018 recipient of the Gill Family Foundation Scholarship.

Emily D. Bello-Pardo is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at American University, and specializes in American Politics, Comparative Politics, and Methodology. Her research interests are political behavior, political communication, and public opinion. More specifically, her work examines the attitudinal impacts of online "fake news", online discursive incivility, and public policy shifts, and uses experimental and computational social science approaches to explore these topics in the United States and Latin America. In the summer of 2017, Ms. Bello-Pardo was selected as one of eight Google NewsLab Fellows and worked at the Pew Research Center's Journalism Project. Before starting her doctoral studies at AU, Ms. Bello-Pardo obtained a MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Florida International University (FIU), where she held a Research Fellowship at the Latin American Marijuana Research Initiative. In this role, she studied Uruguay's marijuana legalization process and public opinion surrounding this policy shift. Previously, she received dual BAs in Political Science and International Relations from FIU, where she was inducted Phi Beta Kappa, graduated magna cum laude, and was President of the Debate Team. Born in Caracas, she served in 2012 as the US National Director of VotoJoven, a Venezuelan student organization that promoted voting and equal access to civil and political rights in that country.

This publication is an interdisciplinary journal of political science and history, published by American University, Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies since 1984. The journal is now being published three times a year. Congress & the Presidency features articles on Congress, the President, the interaction between the two institutions, and national policy-making.
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