Menchik’s Twitter Thread in NYT Op-Ed on 2020 U.S. Elections
Jeremy Menchik, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Fredrick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently quoted in an op-ed in the New York Times on U.S President Trump’s hope for a 2016 repeat in the upcoming 2020 elections. The Opinion piece by Thomas Edsall and published on April 22, 2020, used a tweet thread by Menchik as a key argument of the piece.
From the text of the article, entitled “Trump Reaches Back Into His Old Bag of Populist Tricks“:
Jeremy Menchik argues in a lengthy Twitter thread that “these protests have something for everyone: small-business, concerns for the working class, anti-elitism for resentful rural whites, fetishism of guns for NRA, dislike of government for traditional conservatives. It’s a crosscutting issue even amid a pandemic.”
Menchik makes the point that anti-quarantine protests “will distract the electorate. If the election is a fight between Trump vs governors who refuse to open their economies, Trump doesn’t have to defend his record on Covid-19. He’s an advocate for liberty!”
… Crucially, Menchik argues, “continued protests will help Trump rebuild his coalition of 2016. Scholars of digital social movements emphasize a logic of connective action not collective action; where personalized content sharing across media networks enables coalition building.”
You can read the full op-ed here.
Menchik’s Twitter thread of what social science research tells us about how continued protests could impact the 2020 U.S. Presidential elections can be read here:
It’s tempting to dismiss the protesters in MI, VA, TX, CA, and MN as irrelevant wakadoddles.
That’s a mistake.
Social science research suggests continued protests could effect the 2020 US presidential election in at least 6 ways.
A thread/
— Jeremy Menchik (@jeremymenchik) April 20, 2020
Jeremy Menchik is Assistant Professor in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explains the meaning of tolerance to the world’s largest Islamic organizations and was the co-winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations. His research has appeared in the academic journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Politics, International Studies Review, Asian Studies Review, South East Asia Research, andPolitics and Religion. His recent research focuses on the politics of modern religious authority and the origins of the missionary impulse.