The work and research insights of University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences Associate Professor and LDI Senior Fellow Daniel Hopkins have been getting wide pickup across the spectrum of election-related media coverage.

Hopkins, PhD, a political scientist who moved to Penn from Georgetown University ten months ago, specializes in analyzing policymaking and U.S. voter behavior, with a strong emphasis on racial and ethnic trends.

The recent Associated Press story that ran in metropolitan daily newspapers across the country as well as the PBS Newshour with the headline, “Black Voters See Fight Over Next Supreme Court Justice as Obama Snub,” prominently quoted Hopkins.

Media and voter skew
A lengthy article in Phys.org — a science news outlet that, according to Quantcast, is visited by 1.8 million U.S. readers a month — previewed Hopkins’ book-in-progress entitled, “The Increasingly United States.” The work focuses on the heavy skew of voter attention away from local and state elections to  intense engagement with national elections. He noted that “As Americans transition from print newspapers and local television news to the internet and cable television, they are also leaving behind the media sources most likely to provide state and local information.”

Hopkins and his work has also been featured in a number of prominent news stories in Slate, The National Review, Newsweek, The Conversation, and The Daily Princetonian exploring the immigration issues that have been such a contentious part of this year’s primary elections. Along with Jens Hainmueller of Stanford, Hopkins is the co-author of a study of U.S. voters’ attitudes about immigration entitled, “The Hidden American Immigration Consensus.” 

Bifurcated immigration sentiments
That 2015 study published in the American Journal of Political Science found a consensus among voters — both Democrat and Republican across essentially all socio-economic levels — that highly-educated and skilled immigrants should be welcomed but that the flow of unskilled immigrants should be tightly controlled.  

In a related but different electoral topic, Hopkins, who also holds a faculty appointment at Penn’s Annenberg School of Communications in the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics (ISCP), was featured in a major Yahoo! Politics News article about Donald Trump’s rise.

Trump supporters’ attitudes
For the past nine years, the ISCP has been regularly surveying the same group of voters and Hopkins spoke to Yahoo! Politics about how that data provided “an unparalleled look at Trump supporters’ attitudes long before they even knew Trump would run.”

Yahoo! reported that the ISCP information showed that “Prior to Trump, the people who would go on to back him in 2016 rated themselves much less conservative than the people who would go on to back Ted Cruz. The distinction was most pronounced on social issues: Future Trump supporters were almost as pro-choice as future Hillary Clinton supporters; they were also a little less opposed to same-sex marriage than future Cruz supporters.”

The Monkey Cage
Hopkins also frequently writes a column for both FiveThiryEight.com, the ESPN-owned site that takes its name from the number of electors in the U.S. Electoral College, and The Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” section, which is named after famed journalist H.L. Mencken’s humorous notion that “Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

Last Fall, Hopkins received two American Political Science Association (APSA) awards. The first was the Clarence Stone Award for “making a significant impact in the field of urban politics.” The second was the Warren Miller Prize for best article published in the journal Political Analytics for “Causal Interference in Conjoint Analysis,” the study of a new method for conducting and understanding the results of politically-related polling.