This essay opens JAS’s special issue on American Studies and the 2024 Election in which contributors explore issues that rose to prominence during the election campaign and the first months of the second Trump administration using a variety of disciplinary lenses and methodologies. It analyses why Trump became only the second president in history to win non-consecutive terms in office and assesses the transformative significance of his early second-term initiatives. At the same time, it advances the guiding premise of the special issue: that the broad objects of study, interdisciplinary approaches, and asynchronous perspectives of American Studies can combine with history and political science to help us better understand Trump’s victory, its causes, and its possible consequences. As demonstrated by It Can’t Happen Here, literature and other cultural outputs can enrich understanding of American history and politics at any given time. As an Area Studies discipline, with a geographical organising principle that compliments the traditional chronological frameworks of English and History, American Studies foregrounds relations between states and regions, and at a national and transnational scale that shape US politics and require consideration to better appreciate the complexity of the country that national aggregates may fail to reveal.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was seemingly everywhere by the end of 2024, and the 2024 US presidential election was the first American national election to be conducted wholly in an AI era. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about how effectively generative AI contributes to learning about politics. This study explores that question in the context of research on subnational US politics. Based on a novel methodology that combines the analysis of AI-generated profiles on several US states with interviews with state-level experts, this article identifies and analyses a prevalent national bias in the state-level content produced by generative AI. This bias is both a consequence of and a contributor to the problem of the nationalization of American politics, which itself undermines the principles of federalism that undergird Madisonian democracy in the United States.

This paper traces the way(s) Republican political leaders have infused a right-wing populist ideology at the heart of Republican Party programs over thirty years. It does so through analysis of the institutional supports and historical factions that have shaped the evolution of the Republican Party over the last century. A change in coalition forces that control the Republican Party has encouraged the emergence of a Republican Party that holds, among other things, that some radical political actions (such as the 6 January insurrection) are legitimate, while other radical political action (such as the George Floyd protests) is not. For many Republicans in the newly dominant Trump coalition, some seemingly anti-state action is in fact legitimate when undertaken in defense of a “true” US Constitution, while other action, even when clearly legal, is inherently a threat to the “true” US Constitution.

This essay shows how the United States racialized refugees through photography. American policy makers and news media have deployed photography as a definitive tool in characterizing Haitian “economic migrants” as “bad” refugees in opposition to “good” or “model” refugees from Vietnam. A cluster of black bodies on an unseaworthy boat came to represent an economic and hygienic threat, unlike the Vietnamese who are political victims of an oppressive communist regime. To critique our optical framework regulated by the Cold War racial politics, this essay historicizes how refugees were produced by American warfare and militarism. In the United States, war making, race making, and refugee making are mutually constitutive.

During the 1930s and 1940s, a group of right-wing intellectuals, sparked by the New Deal, mounted a sustained critique of American democracy and inherited democratic principles. Believing that the progressive democratization of the state had resulted in a decadent, inefficient and morally coarse society, they attacked democracy as the root cause of the nation’s problems. Examining the reactionary conservative, libertarian and fascist critiques of democracy, this article suggests that each borrowed ideas from the other, and that their beliefs in autocratic rule or a broadly counter-majoritarian politics have not been adequately studied by scholars.

For decades, the Democratic Party has commanded the overwhelming support of racial and ethnic minority voters in the United States. While a majority of Black, Latino, and Asian American voters continue to vote for the Democrats, recent elections and polls have suggested that Republicans are making inroads. The 2024 Democratic electorate was whiter than it had been in 2012, even though the US has become more racially diverse in that same period. There has been much speculation in the media over Donald Trump’s apparent appeal to some racial and ethnic minority voters, but not enough attention has been given to differences between and within racial and ethnic minority groups. This article emphasizes key differences. African Americans have remained more loyal to the Democratic Party than Latino and Asian American electorates. The article then examines class and ideological differences within racial and ethnic groups. It finds that while working-class and conservative Latinos and Asian Americans have joined the Republican fold, the same cannot be said to the same extent for working-class or conservative African Americans. Intergenerational partisan socialization is identified as a key difference.