Boris Heersink

A Friendship Built on Keeping the Dim Sum Carts Rolling In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, these women have forged a friendship while serving baskets of dumplings at a cavernous dim sum restaurant.

Pik Chan and Cheong Yin Ho have worked together for nearly two decades. They start each shift the same way: Sharing a home-cooked meal, side-by-side. “It’s rare to meet someone you can work with for 16 years,” Pik said.

Well then.

We shall never know!

We could definitely try a Green Book version if you're game!

I would add that in terms of transportation it would be difficult for people to live far from where they worked. One possibility is that workers were local seasonally and lived elsewhere in the fall/winter. But if that's the case no geographic reliance on a shark attacks treatment would work.

That is definitely a concern - at the county level it should not matter (unless we assume people work at the shore but live in completely different counties). At the town level it might be a problem and we include models in the appendix where we incorporate areas bordering places with hotels.

We went through multiple travel guides - the first one we got a lot of help on from the Fordham librarians. I think the one we used for the main analyses you found?

[This entire project took a while, everything's a blur.]

YOU KNOW THEY'RE COMING, HANS!

Your 2026 vacation pictures might come in very handy for anybody in 2136 studying the effects of kangaroo attacks on the midterms!

I think those are dolphins. Maybe dolphin attacks DO cause voters to punish presidents!! (Dolphins are immoral freaks.)

Depends on who the sharks attack, Kenny. Maybe they attack places with bad people. Very bad people. The worst people.

But (2) how we measure these kinds of things matters; testing retrospection require us to think carefully about who we think were affected by a treatment. The original binary approach to measuring was one way to do it, but we argue our approach more accurately represents the mechanism.

Using this data we run the models Fowler and Hall run in their paper and we find.... no shark attacks effects. We think the takeaways of this are that (1) if you combine our findings with those of F&H it seems like there was no blind retrospection in 1916 in response to the shark attacks.

David and I found a travel guide from 1916 that listed hotels and their number of rooms across NJ. This allowed us to measure more directly what areas the A&B mechanism should consider treated; if voters were punishing Wilson that punishment should be strongest in shore areas with more tourism.

But there was massive variation even on the shore as to which parts of New Jersey saw beach tourism and which parts did not. Meaning, some towns that are coded as 'beach' had no or very few hotels while others (like Atlantic City) had many.

Achen and Bartels and Fowler and Hall (in replications/extensions) rely on a binary approach of identifying whether counties or towns should be considered 'treated' by shark attacks. In the case of Achen and Bartels this means 'beach' (i.e. Jersey shore) counties/towns are considered affected.

Achen and Bartels do stress they welcome challenges that incorporate new historical data or evidence relevant to the specific historical context of the 1916 shark attacks and their (potential) electoral consequences. This what we tried to do in this paper.

However, in response to THAT Achen and Bartels dismiss Fowler and Hall's criticism as being largely irrelevant since they do not engage with the specific mechanism or historical context they claim produced the Wilson 1916 punishment (shark attacks, therefore economic downturn, therefore punishment).

In response, Fowler and Hall rejected Achen and Bartels' findings - arguing (amongst others) that there is no systematic 'shark attack' effect in elections outside of 1916 and that even for the 1916 case the findings Achen and Bartels present are the product of very specific model choices.

To Achen and Bartels this is a key example of 'blind retrospection'; voters punishing candidates because something bad happened without considering whether those candidates really had any way to do anything about the bad thing.

To recap that debate; Achen and Bartels have argued that a series of shark attacks off the coast of New Jersey in the summer of 1916 caused a massive decline in beach tourism that year which, subsequently, resulted in voters punishing President Woodrow Wilson in the presidential election.

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To add excitement to everybody's Presidents Day; @davidryanmiller.com and I have a new article out today in American Politics Research in which we engage with the 1916 shark attacks debate. journals.sagepub.com/share/YQAM7F...

We based much of this paper on in-depth interviews we did with many of the activists involved, but also with people working in the White House, in Congress, and the Democratic Party more broadly. We have also made the transcripts of these interviews available; dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm....

That paid off: Obama embraced LGBT rights in a way no president before him had. And once he did, it became one of the key elements of his legacy. But the fact that that embrace happened when and how it happened - we argue - was very much the product of intense activism from LGBT activists.

While Obama was generally friendly to gay rights, he and people around him were concerned embracing LGBT rights too fast and too publicly could produce backlash. So, gay rights activists (and even LGBT people working inside the White House!) had to put pressure on Obama to deliver.

In it we look at how gay rights activists were able to use different approaches to pressure Obama and his administration to act on repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell and Obama's own 'evolution' on same-sex marriage. While Obama came around on these topics (and others) it was not easy getting him there.

Through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall: Barack Obama, the Gay Rights Movement, and the Formative Relationship Between Presidents and Social Activists Organized groups frequently appeal to the president of the United States for support of their policy agenda. However, even if presidents are broadly supportive of the groups in question, they may not...

Happy to report that I have a new article out with Sid Milkis in Presidential Studies Quarterly: "Through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall: Barack Obama, the Gay Rights Movement, and the Formative Relationship Between Presidents and Social Activists" (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...)!

I am absolutely over the moon that my book “The Republican House Divided: Civil War Memory, Civil Rights, and the Transformation of the GOP” is officially published TODAY!

After years of hard work, I am incredibly proud. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible 📚🐘🗃️

@uscpress.bsky.social

OR EARLIER!