Stanford “Election 2012” Course Draws to Close with a Post Mortem and Predictions

Worth a quick men­tion: Stan­ford’s Elec­tion 2012 course (pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned here) wrapped up with a post-mortem. It starts with Steve Schmidt, a for­mer John McCain and George W Bush advi­sor, giv­ing a fair­ly blunt assess­ment of where the Repub­li­can Par­ty stands right now. (The video above starts with his assess­ment.) Then Tom Stey­er, an asset man­ag­er, phil­an­thropist and envi­ron­men­tal­ist active in Demo­c­rat pol­i­tics, explains why Oba­ma’s vic­to­ry is the prod­uct of trends (not nec­es­sar­i­ly healthy ones) already seen in Cal­i­for­nia pol­i­tics for the past decade. And Simon Jack­man, a Stan­ford prof immersed in polling, shows why data mat­ters and Nate Sil­ver (538 blog) got things right.

The rolling con­ver­sa­tion is mod­er­at­ed by David Kennedy (Pulitzer Prize-win­ning his­to­ri­an), Rob Reich, and Jim Stey­er. We’ve pro­vid­ed YouTube links to the remain­ing lec­tures below. You can also find them on iTunes. Plus we’ve  cat­a­logued Elec­tion 2012 in our col­lec­tion of 550 Free Online Cours­es.

• Mark McK­in­non, Chris Lehane, and Gary Segu­ra on the state of the 2012 Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion
• David Kennedy on the his­to­ry of the Amer­i­can pres­i­den­cy
• John Tay­lor and Ken Arrow on the econ­o­my and the elec­tion
• Pamela Kar­lan and Good­win Liu dis­cuss the elec­tion’s impact on the Supreme Court
• Michael Arma­cost and Mike McCur­ry dis­cuss for­eign pol­i­cy
• John Hen­nessy (Stan­ford’s pres­i­dent) and experts take a glob­al look at the elec­tion
• Bruce Cain and Gavin New­som dis­cuss the future of Cal­i­for­nia pol­i­tics