UC Davis Experts for 2026 Midterm Elections

The University of California, Davis, has a number of experts in political science, law, communication, history and other areas who can address issues in the 2026 midterm elections. In addition to statewide candidates, California voters will decide on 17 ballot measures in the Nov. 3 election.

History, political movements, parties

Jim Adams, professor of political science, studies parties, elections and public opinion. His work analyzes parties’ election strategies along with the causes of cross-party hostility and distrust in western publics. His book, American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective, compares Americans’ political anger and distrust with the levels of anger and distrust in 19 other western publics. Contact: jfadams@ucdavis.edu

Traci Parker, associate professor of history, is a specialist in African American history. Her work focuses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, labor, consumer capitalism, gender and sexuality. Her first book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), was named a 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She is the co-editor of The New Civil Rights Movement Reader: Resistance, Resilience, and Justice (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023). She is the co-author of I Was Called: The Activist Life of Coretta Scott King (forthcoming 2027, Yale University Press). Her current book project, Revolutionary Love (Bloomsbury Press), explores activists’ romantic relationships in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Prior to coming to UC Davis, she worked in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Contact: tparker@ucdavis.edu

Greg Downs, professor and chair of the Department of History, is an expert on 19th century America and the transformation of the Constitution around the end of slavery, the establishment of equal protection under the law, and the extension of voting rights. He has co-written amicus briefs for the Supreme Court and other federal courts on the relevance of history to contemporary legal debates about voting and affirmative action, among other issues. He is one of 18 historians selected by the Brennan Center at New York University to serve on the council that advises on historical constitutional issues. Contact: gdowns@ucdavis.edu

Erik Engstrom, professor of political science, specializes in the study of the U.S. Congress, political parties and American political development. He is the author of four books: The Politics of Ballot Design (with Jason M. Roberts, 2021, Cambridge), Race, Class, and Social Welfare (with Robert Huckfeldt, 2020, Cambridge), Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy (2013, Michigan) and Party Ballots, Reform, and the Transformation of America’s Electoral System (with Samuel Kernell, 2014, Cambridge, 2015 Winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize). Contact: ejengstrom@ucdavis.edu 

Chris Hare, associate professor of political science, uses statistical modeling and innovative quantitative methodology to better understand voting behavior, public opinion and political campaigns. Since 2017, he has taught workshops on machine learning applications in the social sciences for the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis. He is also a co-author of the book Analyzing Spatial Models of Choice and Judgment. Contact: 530-754-0942, cdhare@ucdavis.edu

Polarization, conspiracy theories, extremism and political violence

Magdalena Wojcieszak is a professor of communication at UC Davis. Her research examines how people select (political) information online, the effects of digital media on extremity, polarization, (mis)perceptions and interventions to minimize online harm and increase exposure to verified political contents. She has authored or co-authored roughly 90 research papers and is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study, an independent partnership with Meta to study the impact of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 U.S. elections. Contact: mwojcieszak@ucdavis.edu

Professor of history Kathryn S. Olmsted has long investigated conspiracy theories, from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, and many that have cropped up since, even during the primary and general elections. She authored Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009); it was reissued in 2019 with a new epilogue on the first Trump administration. She has also written op-eds comparing Watergate and the Trump impeachment inquiry in The New York Times and Washington Post. In her recent research, she also has re-examined the labor disputes in Depression-era California that led California’s businessmen and media to create a new style of politics with corporate funding, intelligence gathering, professional campaign consultants and alliances between religious and economic conservatives. She has been featured in numerous podcasts and documentaries. Her 2015 book is Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism. Her most recent book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, looks at the isolationist media in the U.S. and the U.K. in the 1930s and 1940s. Olmsted also co-edited a book on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and has published journal articles and book chapters that highlight her overlapping areas of expertise: conspiracy theories, government secrecy, espionage, counterintelligence and anticommunism. Contact: 530-752-7764, ksolmsted@ucdavis.edu

Garen Wintemute, an emergency room physician and director of the UC Davis Centers for Violence Prevention, is one of the nation’s foremost experts in violence prevention. Since 2022, he has conducted a nationally representative longitudinal survey of U.S. adults that tracks attitudes toward political violence. He is available to discuss what the 2026 survey findings reveal about public attitudes, political extremism, democratic resilience and election-related violence (and how to prevent it) ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Contact: gjwintemute@health.ucdavis.edu

Propositions 40, 41 and 42

Darien Shanske is Martin Luther King Jr. professor of law at King Hall. An expert on taxation, local government law, public finance and political theory, he takes an exceptionally long view of jurisprudence, informed by his scholarship on ancient Athens. Prior to becoming a professor, he worked as a financial consultant to California local governments and as an attorney in the public finance department of Sidley Austin in San Francisco before clerking for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Some of his current projects are on the local property tax, the state and local fiscal relationship, the fiscal constitution of California, and the role of reciprocity in Aristotle. Contact: 530-752-5860, dshanske@ucdavis.edu

Vikram D. Amar is Daniel J. Dykstra distinguished professor of law at King Hall. He is one of the most respected, and most frequently cited, authorities on constitutional law, federal courts and civil procedure. In addition to co-authoring leading textbooks on constitutional law, federal practice and procedure and civil procedure, he has published more than 60 articles in leading law reviews and frequently comments for the media. He served as dean and Iwan Foundation professor of law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign College of Law for eight years. Before that, he was a King Hall professor and senior associate dean for academic affairs. He clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. Contact: vdamar@ucdavis.edu

Proposition 44

Leticia Saucedo is Martin Luther King Jr. professor of law at King Hall. She is an expert in employment, labor and immigration law and she teaches immigration law, employment law, labor law and torts at UC Davis. She has been a visiting professor at Duke Law School and a research scholar with the Chief Justice Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at UC Berkeley. Saucedo's research interests lie at the intersections of employment, labor and immigration law. She has focused her research on the impact of employment and labor laws on conditions in low-wage workplaces, and on the responses of immigrant workers to their conditions. Her law review articles have appeared in Washington University Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, UC Davis Law Review and the Ohio State Law Journal, among others. Contact: 530-752-3426, lmsaucedo@ucdavis.edu

Proposition 45 

Christopher S. Elmendorf, professor of law, works in the areas of property law, election law, statutory interpretation, and administrative law, using both doctrinal and empirical methods. He is a leading authority on California land-use and housing law, and has done widely noted work on public understanding of housing markets and opinion about housing policy. His research has been published in numerous top law reviews and political science journals and he is often quoted and published in general-circulation and broadcast media on housing issues. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the MIT Election Science and Data Lab, and an Interdisciplinary Research Grant from the UC Davis Committee on Research. Contact: 530-752-5756, cselmendorf@ucdavis.edu