The recent disastrous election has shaken the political world to its core. As the votes were tallied and states were called, the methods and conventional wisdom that made up much of modern political practices, and that had underpinned most of the election coverage and victory forecasting came to nothing. The harsh lessons of that Tuesday night laid bare a number of false assumptions and 'proven' practices of both parties, but came down particularly hard on the Democratic Party. It was a combination of factors that led to its shameful defeat at the polls. The Party, and indeed the nation placed their hope and faith in the data analytics of Silicon Valley tech oracles, who rose to prominence with their analysis of the Obama elections. Their sophisticated computer algorithms took the results of multi-million dollar polls to forecast the most statistically accurate results and predicted an almost overwhelming Clinton victory.

In response to the revelations of these data prophets, the Party, in a supreme showing of arrogance, aloofness, and downright poor judgment, neglected to put camping resources into the rustbelt states where Trump’s message had the most resonance and where the blue collar union voters, that are the core strength of democrats in the area, were most vulnerable to his appeal. The political elites were confident that tech had replaced the need for the instincts of political veterans or the wisdom of political historians and they could comfortably float to victory on the twin pillars of metadata analytics and sophisticated micro targeted ground organizing. The election revealed the folly inherent in this belief as expert after expert was disproven and an inevitable Clinton victory was changed into a Trump coup to the surprise of almost everyone who followed the media coverage.

In our quest to understand how this happened and assign fault for the catastrophe that was the election, we must realize that a key part of the blame lies not just in arrogant and distant elites, but in the very way politics is taught as an academic discipline in schools across the country. I know what many of you must be thinking. "What does the teaching of politics have to do with the election?" Well, sit tight because the answer is that it has everything to do with the election. In the current American academic model taught at most universities across the country, politics is part of the science school alongside such empirical subjects as biology and chemistry. Its main methods emphasize the role of various models of statistics and datasets in determining everything from comparing political systems, to studying foreign relations, to analyzing elections. Now politics does seem to be a odd fit as science considering it deals so heavily with fundamentally qualitative subjects such as various ideologies, identities, and philosophies where decisions are motivated just as much by feelings and convictions as by facts. This goes without mentioning the other elephant in the room of political science, the fact that it is virtually impossible to replicate events in politics or to control for every variable like in every other science.

This current state of affairs was not always the case. Historically politics was taught as one of the many subjects of the humanities along with its close academic siblings history, philosophy, and economics. It was only with the dawn of the twentieth century that politics professors began to feel envious of their colleagues in the natural sciences and began to try and turn their discipline into one as well utilizing new developments in polling and psychology to emulate their empirical peers. With the rise of complicated algorithms and people like Nate Silver, it seemed empirical politic’s day had finally arrived and the rocky integration would come to a smooth and inevitable end. Instead the experts were left scratching their heads at the utter failure of empirical politics to predict this outcome where as a more humanistic approach might of yielded a different result.

Now the question is how do we fix this? This election, for all the horror, has afforded us a golden chance to reform politics as an academic discipline and restore it to its rightful home in the humanities. People’s faith in the completely empirical way of doing politics is at an all time low and the willingness to explore alternative paths is rising. Despite the difficulties involved with such a transition it is indeed possible. One of the things I love most about USF is that it has abandoned the teaching of politics as an empirical subject and has opted to return to the more traditional route of teaching the practicing of politics and the study of its development. The ideal for rehabilitating the study of politics across the nation would be to learn from universities like USF that have returned to the humanistic ways of understanding politics and to begin creating a new integrated, interdisciplinary study of politics.

Despite all this, it is not to say that there isn't a place for the empirical in politics. Polls are still valuable ways to take snapshots of moments in time and to chart some of the underlying currents of public opinion, but its place is as a compliment to the humanistic aspect of politics. Undertaking such a massive reform will not be easy, but the long-term benefits far outweigh the short-term costs and difficulties. With an improved study of politics, the way to create a more effective application of politics for the future can begin.