The Elephants in the Room

Debra Fine to introduce. Seth Masket is a professor of political science at the University of Denver. He is the author of The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders (Cambridge, 2026), Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020 (Cambridge, 2020), The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy (Oxford, 2016), and No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures (Michigan, 2009), as well as a co-author of a recent textbook on political parties. He studies political parties, campaigns and elections, and state legislatures. He contributes occasionally at Politico, the Denver Post, and other publications, and maintains a popular Substack newsletter, “The Smotus Report.”