A Must-Read Book on 2020.

It is not my normal experience to devote more than a single column to reviewing any book, but the book that has just been published by the Annenberg IOD Collaborative, Democracy Amid Crises, Polarization, Pandemic, Protests & Persuasion, deserves multiple columns simply because it contains too much consequential information to be discussed in a brief space.

The group which conducted and publishes the research for this work, calling themselves the Institutions of Democracy (IOD) Collaborative, are 11 scholars representing 5 academic disciplines and resident at 6 different academic institutions, who joined together beginning in 2019 under the aegis of the Annenberg School to study the interplay of democratic institutions and electoral politics during a period which enclosed four great crisis: the Pandemic, the economic collapse, the widespread protests following the murder of George Floyd and the events of January 6th.

The research consisted of eleven surveys, each one engaging more than 9,000 respondents but here was the first most crucial and most brilliant choice made by the authors of this book. Rather than conducting the usual ‘nationally-representative’ surveys whose results have to be qualified by all kinds of ‘maybe this’ or ‘maybe that’ assertions, these surveys covered residents of only four states — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — considered the…