Introduction to Special Forum on the Geographies of the Presidential Election

As the U.S. Presidential campaigns grew increasingly turbulent in the midwinter of 2016, the editorial team at Southeastern Geographer began to wonder how different geographers might make sense of the complex socio-spatial dynamics shaping the election season. Viewing the journal as a forum in which to wrestle with the complex geographies of the southern region of the U.S., we were particularly interested in the implications of the growing relevance of southern voters to presidential elections, as evidenced in stacking of Super Tuesday primaries to include four southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia) among the 12 states voting. At the same time, viewing the region relationally, we were interested to bring together voices that could iterate between a regional and national perspective on the presidential campaigns. To that end, we reached out to geographers from across the discipline and across the country whose work could help us make some sense of the twists and turns of this campaign season. We invited seasoned political geographers John Agnew and Fred Shelley and urban/cultural/political geographers Caroline Nagel Winders to draw on their respective areas of expertise. Together, these essays offer textured perspectives on the voting patterns and political discourses which distinguish the current presidential campaign season.

John Agnew and Michael Shin, having drawn powerfully on geographical analysis to shed light on the rise and fall of Sergio Berlusconi in Berlusconi’s Italy: Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics (2008, Temple University Press), consider the parallels between Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump. Their essay offers a critical reflection on the dramaturgy of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, reading Trump’s ascendance in part against re-alignments of party politics. Dr. Agnew has invoked the concept of political dramaturgy as a way to consider the staging of political parties’ interests at different geographical scales (Agnew 1997), and the term resonates here in a way that sheds light on the “Theater of and Jamie Politics”.

Fred Shelley and Ashley Hitt blend traditional techniques of electoral analysis (which Shelley helped pioneer, see Archer and Shelley 1986; Shelley 1984) with data derived from social media to tease apart the demographics of support for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It is well known by now that Sanders plays especially well to millennial voters. In an innovative and iterative approach, Shelley and Shin combine social media data with exit poll data to offer insight into the demographics of support for the candidate who has, by many accounts, used social media more effectively than any other candidate for U.S. office, ever. In an exploratory mode, and with caveats in mind about large but biased samples, Shelley and Hitt juxtapose the results of exit polls with the geography of face-book “likes” for Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in overwhelmingly Republican Alabama and Oklahoma.

Caroline Nagel’s essay offers an historical lens on the mixed reception of immigrants into Southern communities (Winders 2013; Ehrkamp and Nagel 2014; Steusse and Coleman2014), and the deep ambivalence with which the U.S. as a whole has received refugees over recent decades. In an essay which richly situates conditions in southern states in relation to national discourses and anxieties, Nagel considers how it is that President Obama’s decision to admit a mere 10,000 refugees from critically war-torn Syria “create[d] such a fuss”. Nagel draws on her ongoing research into the reception of immigrants and refugees (Ehrkamp and Nagel 2012, 2014; Nagel 2013) in southern communities to unpack the appeal of national scale anti-Muslim, pro-border control discourses to Southern voters.

Finally, Jamie Winders draws on her past work examining the figure of the immigrant within political and organizational discourse (Winders 2011) to sift through the “headlines, debate zingers, and soundbites” of the fractious presidential campaign season. She examines the immigration policy statements of the leading (remaining) candidates for the highest office in the U.S. tracing differential emphases on immigrants as sources of threat, as members of families, and as workers. Winders also notes a temporal dimension to the competing immigration stances of the presidential candidates, evaluating candidates...