Sadly, we have now come to the end of the blog portion of my project. I know there were a lot of topics I wanted to cover and haven't found the time to, but hopefully these posts have inspired you (and myself) to go out and research these topics on your own.
In a very conclusion-y way, I am going to write this in a question-answer format. Hopefully this makes more sense than the first draft I had written, which was a lot of mumbo jumbo.
What have you learned from completing this project?
A lot. I tried to make a list, and every time I went back to it I would add something and cross something else off. Ultimately, I learned that context matters. We can't just look at the election and attribute a success or failure of one candidate to one specific event. And even though I had a rough idea of this prior to the beginning of my project, I've seen this concept flourish in a lot of ways. My blog posts are so interconnected, and yet can each stand individually. To me, this demonstrates that campaigns are intricate and complicated and are more rooted in what's happening at the time than basic campaign theory.
I also saw how, albeit demographic trends stay stable, turnout will fluctuate a lot from year to year. I also didn't have much written about this (because I ran out of time), but if you read my demographics post, you'll see that a lot of the outcome of the election was rooted in who turned out to vote (and who didn't turn out to vote) in unprecedented numbers.
Do you plan to continue this line of research?
Yes! Actually, no. This is complicated.
I do want to continue studying political science. However, "poli sci" as a field is too broad to simply say yes or no. With Mr. Westbay, I broke down what I "did" in to a few categories to give a more specific answer:
-comparative analytics between elections
As far as comparative analysis goes, I think the research was interesting; however, I am not sold on doing this forever. I feel like what I did here was based more in history than political science. Also, comparative politics generally refers to case study comparison between different places at the same time. I did the inverse (same place, different time: 2008 vs 2012 vs 2016).
-campaign strategy analysis
I loved this element! Albeit a little too hypothetical, I absolutely am interested in continuing working with campaign specifically.
-determined cause/effect of event/rhetoric; discerned motivations of different candidates and whether or not desired result was achieved
Again, this was a little more historical than political. I don't know that I want to spend a lot of time researching past events to find hypothetical alternative conclusions.
What do you plan on doing in the future? How has this project influenced your future goals?
I am going to study political science at the University of Chicago next fall! That plan has stayed pretty consistent for the majority of senior year. But this project has influenced some more specific elements of my future goals.
In doing this research, I could only analyze how people voted based on facts. In doing so, I removed a lot of the emotional elements that are involved in voting. And, as weird as it sounds, the emotions are actually my favorite part of politics. I love that political science is one of the most personal and powerful routes of change, and I think people should get emotional about that. And emotions are found in political science, but not quite as much in the statistics/pollster elements of political research. So, in that sense, you probably won't find me on the research side of politics in the future.
And finally, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you to the readers who have stuck with me for all the inconsistent content that came out of nowhere. Thank you to Samara Klar for being so helpful and willing to take a risk on me, especially since I had a tendency to wait until the last minute to get things done. Thank you to my parents and teachers, for letting me rant and blabber until I finally understood what I needed to write about. And finally, thank you to Mr. Westbay, for bringing this project together. Without you, I probably would still be trying to write the first blog post, struggling to organize a single set of ideas. I am extremely grateful for your impeccable handwriting and ability to translate what I say into a real idea.
With that, here is the original mind map I made at the beginning of the year when I came up with this project plan. Additionally, is a smaller but better drawn mind map by our very own Mr. Westbay.
