More than 50 million viewers were expecting a cold standoff to start last night's debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. University of Delaware experts say Trump was likely more shocked than they were when Harris walked to his podium for a cordial handshake.
"It was a clearly planned move on Harris' part intending to assert some dominance over someone whose entire schtick is about being dominant. And it was successful, and I think it discomforted Trump," said David Redlawsk, professor of political science and international relations.
Erin Cassese, professor of political science and international relations, said the move exuded confidence, especially given that President Biden and former-President Trump did not shake hands at the outset of their July debate.
"Harris’s pursuit of the handshake showed off the bat that she would engage in this debate on her own terms, Cassese said. "It also had Trump on the back foot, as he seemed not to expect the gesture."
Cassese said the handshake also offset any advantage Trump might have gained due to the podium setup, which could have highlighted their height differential.
"But the handshake showed that Harris was not intimidated by the difference in stature," Cassese said.
Redlawsk is a political psychologist who studies voter behavior and emotion, focusing on how voters process political information to make their decisions. He has written several books on politics, worked behind the scenes on campaigns and ran for local office.
Cassese explores the behavior of women as voters and candidates for political office in the United States. Her areas of expertise are gender, abortion, public opinion, campaigns and elections.
To set up an interview either either expert, reporters can visit their ExpertFile pages and clicking on the "contact" button.
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2 min
Voter behavior and emotion, civil discourse, the spread of misinformation, the role of gender and race in politics and conspiracy theories are among the many topics University of Delaware experts can comment on during this final stretch of the 2024 campaign.
David Redlawsk Professor of Political Science and International Relations Expertise: Political psychologist who studies voter behavior and emotion, focuses on how voters process political information to make their decisions. He has written several books on politics, worked behind the scenes on campaigns and ran for local office. Dannagal Young Professor of Communication Director of the Center for Political Communication Expertise: The spread of misinformation in politics and the intersection of entertainment and information, with an emphasis on political satire, political media effects, public opinion and the psychology of political humor. Kassra Oskooii Professor of Political Science and International Relations Expertise: Focuses on the interplay between the contextual and psychological determinants of political opinions and behaviors of high and low status group members. Erin Cassese Professor of Political Science and International Relations Expertise: Explores the behavior of women as voters and candidates for political office, and studies political psychology, gender stereotypes, public opinion, elections and the intersection of religion and politics. Yasser Payne Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies Expertise: Research program also focuses on Black racial identity; street identity; economic and educational opportunity or the impact of structural violence. Tim Shaffer SNF Ithaca Director Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Chair of Civil Discourse Expertise: Civil discourse in politics; can talk about partisanship, polarization and their impact on media outlets. advancement of democratic practices by focusing on the role of civic professionals in institutional settings. Alice Ba Professor and acting chair, Political Science and International Relations. Expertise: Her work on the international relations of East and Southeast Asia examines the structures, processes, and systemic effects of regionalism and cooperative regime building, as well as relations between smaller and major powers. Joanne Miller Professor of American Politics, Research Methods and Political Psychology Expertise: Studies political psychology, with an emphasis on political propaganda, misinformation and conspiracy theories. Muqtedar Khan Professor of Comparative Politics, International Relations and Political Theory Expertise: Issues surrounding U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim World as well as national security and counter-terrorism. To speak with any of these experts, simply visit their profle and click on the "contact" button, which will send a message directly to them (while also copying UD's media relations team).
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1 min
When members of the jury handed down their guilty verdict in NY v. Donald J. Trump, they had simply completed their nearly three-month stint of civic duty. At the same time, they had set in motion a seismic shift in the 2024 election. What's not clear is which way that shift will go, said David Redlawsk, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware.
Redlawsk is a political psychologist with expertise in campaigns, voter behavior, decision making and emotion. His research focuses on how voters process political information to make their decisions.
In addition to publishing volumes of research and writing several books on politics, Redlawsk also has years of experience on the frontlines. He's worked behind the scenes on campaigns and ran for local office – winning and losing as a member of both major parties.
To arrange an interview with Redlawsk, visit his profile and click on the contact button. These messages will go directly to Redlawsk and a member of the UD media relations team.
Media
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Biography
David P. Redlawsk, PhD (Rutgers University, 1997) is the James R. Soles Professor and Chair of Department of Political Science and International Relations and Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. In addition to the PhD, he holds an M.A. degrees from Rutgers University, an M.B.A. from Vanderbilt University, and a B.A. from Duke University. Dr. Redlawsk is a past President of the International Society of Political Psychology, and currently serves as its Treasurer. He previously served ISPP as a Vice President and as an elected Governing Council member. He was a co-editor of the journal Political Psychology from 2010 through 2015. Dr. Redlawsk is an author or editor of 9 books and has published more than 60 articles and book chapters. His newest books are the Oxford Encyclopedia of Political Decision Making, for which he is Editor-in-Chief, and A Citizen's Guide to the Political Psychology of Voting, with UD Ph.D. Michael Habegger (2020, Routledge). An exert on the US presidential nominating system, he wrote the definitive book on the Iowa Caucuses and its effects on nominations, Why Iowa? How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating System, with Caroline Tolbert and Todd Donovan. He is also co-author of The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning with Kyle Mattes, and How Voters Decide, with Richard R. Lau. Dr. Redlawsk's research focuses on campaigns, elections, the role of information in voter decision making, and on emotional responses to campaign information. Dr. Redlawsk has received several grants from the National Science Foundation, and served on the Board of Overseers for the American National Election Studies. Dr. Redlawsk is also experienced in “real-world” politics, often calling himself a “recovering politician.” He lost and won elections for local office in Pennsylvania in the late 1980s and New Jersey in the 1990s and served as Johnson County, IA Democratic Chair during the 2004 Iowa Caucuses. He was also one of Iowa’s elected delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Industry Expertise
International Affairs
Political Organization
Areas of Expertise
Political Campaigns
Decision Making
Survey Research
Politics
Voter Beavior and Attitudes
Political Psychology
Experimental Methods
Presidential Nomination Campaigns
Media Appearances
The Democratic Party agreed to overhaul its primaries, but that arduous process is far from over
PBS
2023-07-03
“Despite the fact that it looked like relatively smooth sailing for the president when he proposed it … the kind of backlash you’re hearing, the reactions, are exactly what we would have expected,” said David Redlawsk, chair of the political science department at the University of Delaware and co-author of the book “Why Iowa? How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process.”
Voters hit the polls to decide who will control Congress, statehouses
Courthouse News online
2022-11-08
“I will say that anyone who thinks they really know what's going to happen on [Election Day] is really just guessing,” University of Delaware political science professor David Redlawsk told Courthouse News.
"The demographics of the state do not guarantee the outcome in the state. That gets lost sometimes," says University of Delaware professor David Redlawsk, a former Democratic party chairman in Iowa’s Johnson County and author of the book "Why Iowa?: How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process."
It’s time to get serious about voting rights — in Delaware and across the U.S. | Opinion
The News Journal online
2021-08-19
Barriers to voting and threats to the right to vote are real and growing. The Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which virtually gutted key parts the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, along with this year’s Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee case upholding new voting restrictions, mark only the beginning. In their wake, extremist politicians are moving quickly to make voting even harder wherever they can. Sen. Chris Coons, Sen. Tom Carper, and the entire U.S. Senate needs to act now to stop this attack on democracy.
U.S. election: What is the electoral college and how does it work?
Euronews online
2020-11-03
"Some people wanted Congress to select the president. Others wanted it to be independent of Congress. The Constitutional Convention was near the end, the delegates were tired. They ultimately came up with a compromise that meant that the states elected the president, not Congress," said David Redlawsk, a professor of political science at the University of Delaware.
Where Biden and Trump are campaigning shows where they think their opportunities are
The News Journal online
2020-10-27
"The biggest reason to pay attention to where candidates are going is the one resource you can't make more of, a candidate's time," said David Redlawsk, an expert in polling and chair of the University of Delaware's political science department.
On Tuesday night, I participated in the webinar, “Understanding the 2020 Election,” hosted by the University of Iowa. During that discussion, one of my fellow panelists, David Redlawsk of the University of Delaware, discussed the role of emotions in politics. As Redlawsk noted, while “negative” emotions such as anger can have behavioral effects (such as increasing the likelihood of voting), less powerful emotions, such as anxiety, operate differently, by forcing voters to “pay attention” to certain issues.
The world’s most overrated general, Donald Trump’s insults, and why contempt matters in politics
LSE Blog online
2019-11-08
While President Trump appears to have popularized its use, the deploying of contempt against political opponents is nothing new, write Kyle Mattes, David P. Redlawsk, and Ira J. Roseman. In new research, they find that contempt played a major role in two 2014 midterm Senate elections, with voters both perceiving it from campaign messaging, and being less likely to vote for a candidate the greater the level of contempt they felt for them.
Academic Freedom Under Attack in Turkey: 2019 Presidential Address, International Society of Political Psychology
Political Psychology
2021
This paper addresses the ongoing challenges to academic freedom in Turkey, site of the 2011 ISPP meeting and a then-burgeoning cadre of political psychologists working to build the discipline in Turkey. In January 2016, the Academics for Peace signed a petition challenging the government's policies towards the Kurds, following which the government began to purge both signatories and other academics. The purge gained traction after the July 2016 attempted coup, which the government put down. Academics and others were dismissed by decree (KHK) and barred from working in any occupation. This paper, a revised version of the 2019 ISPP Presidential Address, discusses the scope of the attack on academic freedom in Turkey and reports on a survey of both dismissed and nondismissed academics in Turkey to discuss the implications of being unexpectedly torn from a position that is as much a calling as it is a job.
The Effects of Politician’s Moral Violations on Voters' Moral Emotions
Political Behavior
2021
Existing empirical research on voters’ responses to individual politicians’ moral transgressions pays limited attention to moral emotions, although moral emotions are an integral part of voters’ moral judgment. This study looks at U.S. voters’ discrete moral emotional responses to politician’s moral violations and examines how these discrete moral emotional responses are dependent on voters’ own moral principles and the extent to which they identify with a political party. We report on a 5 × 3 between-subjects experiment where 2026 U.S. respondents reacted to politicians’ violations of one of five moral foundations defined by Moral Foundations Theory. We randomly vary which moral foundation is violated and the partisanship of the politician. While voters’ own moral principles somewhat condition moral emotional responses, we find that voters’ moral emotional responses mostly depend on partisan identification. When voters share party identity with a politician committing a moral violation, they respond with less anger, contempt, disgust and shame than when they do not share party identity. The effect is greater among strong partisans. However, we find limited evidence that specific moral emotions are activated by violations of particular moral foundations, thereby challenging Moral Foundations Theory.
For political fact-checking enterprises to be effective, two conditions must be met. Voters must be interested in fact-checks, and the fact-checks must encourage voters to reevaluate their beliefs. Here, we study the former: whether voters are interested in reading fact-checks of political candidates’ statements. We use a simulated campaign environment in which participants’ exposure to fact-checks are voluntary. We find that voters are interested in fact-checking, especially for negative campaigns and personal (versus issue) campaigns. We also find that topics salient to voters are most often fact-checked. Finally, we provide evidence for the operation of a motivated reasoning process, as statements made by less preferred candidates were more deeply scrutinized.
Reprehensible, Laughable: The Role of Contempt in Negative Campaigning
American Politics Research
2019
Negativity is common in political rhetoric and advertising, but its effects are variable. One important moderator may be the specific emotions communicated by the messages and potentially in recipients. Contempt may be the emotion often conveyed by uncivil ads, which have attracted considerable interest, particularly in light of increased partisan polarization. Using data from web-based surveys in New Jersey and Iowa, we examine the role contempt played in two U.S. Senate races in 2014. We find respondents perceived contempt—more than anxiety or anger—in four televised negative campaign ads and in candidates’ statements about opponents. Moreover, respondents’ feelings of contempt toward candidates, though less intense than feelings of anger, were of equal or greater significance than anger or anxiety in predicting voting intentions regarding three of the four Senate candidates across the two elections.
Voters’ Partisan Responses to Politicians’ Immoral Behavior
Political Psychology
2019
Politicians’ moral behaviors affect how voters evaluate them. But existing empirical research on the effects of politicians’ violations of moral standards pays little attention to the heterogeneous moral foundations of voters in assessing responses to violations. It also pays little attention to the ways partisan preferences shape responses. We examine voters’ heterogeneous evaluative and emotional responses to presumably immoral behaviors by politicians. We make use of moral foundation theory’s argument that people vary in the extent to which they endorse, value, and use the five universally available moral intuitions: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. We report on a 5 × 3 between-subjects experiment asking a random sample of 2,026 U.S. respondents to respond to politicians’ violations of different moral foundations. We randomly vary which of the five foundations is violated and the partisanship of the actor (Republic/Democrat/Nonpartisan). Results suggest that partisanship rather than moral foundations drives most of U.S. voters’ responses to moral foundations violations by politicians. These foundations seem malleable when partisan actors are involved. While Democrats in this sample show stronger negative emotional response to moral violations than Republicans, partisans of both parties express significantly greater negativity when a politician of the other party violates a moral foundation.
Bringing the Heat Home: Television Spots about Local Impacts Reduce Global Warming Denialism
Environmental Communication
2019
Efforts to educate the general public about global warming and the potential policy solutions that could mitigate its effects have relied on the diffusion of facts. But, cognitive scientists have documented that psychologically distant events like global warming elicit less concern and motivation to act relative to immediate, proximal and certain events. This paper documents a quasi-experiment that tested the effect on attitudes of a television campaign that emphasized the temporally, geographically and socially proximal impacts of global warming on the ecosystems and business activity of a historically conservative area of the United States. The campaign aired on one cable provider. Subscribers of that and of competing providers in the same zip-codes were polled after the campaign. Respondents exposed to the campaign were more likely to believe that global warming is happening, to accept the scientific consensus, to be more concerned about impacts and more supportive of policy solutions.
