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Political science professor’s new bestseller illuminates America’s ‘Identity Crisis’

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Photo of Lynn Vavreck

Lynn Vavreck

For almost a decade, UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck has been telling us the message matters when it comes to American politics, specifically presidential campaigns.

“Every election will create narratives about how the winner won,” said Vavreck, co-author of a recently released bestseller about the 2016 presidential election that uses data-driven analysis to dispel popular misconceptions about why Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

“But it’s common that those narratives don’t quite hold up under scrutiny when we look at polling data and electorate surveys and other data, and that’s particularly true of what we found when we looked closely at 2016,” said Vavreck, who was named the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy in January.

In “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America,”Vavreck and co-authors John Sides, professor of political science at George Washington University, and Michael Tesler, associate professor of political science at UC Irvine, methodically outline the primary battles that led to the eventual matchup between Trump and Clinton. The authors dissect media coverage, national polling, data about voters’ attitudes, the effects of Russian interference, the impact of social media on misinformation and the candidates’ messaging and overarching campaign strategies.

As the nation recalibrates after a contentious midterm election season punctuated by polarized rhetoric and high voter turnout, “Identity Crisis” takes a microscope to what mattered most in 2016.

While historically presidential elections are almost always a referendum on the party in power, and typically a referendum on how well the economy is performing under that power, it’s not ever solely about the economy, Vavreck contends, and which she outlined in her 2009 book “The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns.”

For the most recent election, which was always going to be a toss-up, as “Identity Crisis” painstakingly documents, the message that emerged was all about identity.

Photo of the bestseller "Identity Crisis"

“Identity Crisis” cover

“In 2016, the notion of identity, and how people think about their group compared to other groups was a prism that refracted voters’ ideas about the economy, which created a phenomenon we call ‘racialized economics,” Vavreck said.

Trump was particularly good at identifying and stoking the flames of in-group/out-group insecurities and flash points, with fiery rhetoric around complicated issues like immigration, criminal justice and fears of Islamic terrorism, as well as economic anxiety. Shortly after the election, a prevailing theme of voter rage and frustration began to emerge to explain Trump’s win.

But, according to Vavreck and her co-authors and the data they examined, voters weren’t markedly angrier in 2016 than they were in 2012 or even 2008. And, voters’ attitudes about race weren’t much different between those election time frames, either.

What was different in 2016 was the message, the players, and the fact that “outsider” Trump was willing to tap into racial fears and attitudes in ways that previous Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney, both of whom campaigned against a black candidate, declined to do, Vavreck said.

“I think Trump is not held to the same standards as ‘professional’ politicians because of who he is — so in some way, he was able to do what a typical politician could not do — or certainly would not do,” she said.

This identity messaging strategy was again in play during the recent midterms when the president frequently held up a caravan of asylum seekers from Central America as a national threat while speaking in support of Republican candidates.

Meanwhile, although almost every week there’s a news story about Facebook’s effects on elections and democracies, Vavreck is doubtful about how much impact the social networking platform truly wields, mostly because of the nature of the interaction on the site. People mostly follow and see posts from people who already think very similarly to them.

And the oft-discussed Russian ads were seen by a relatively small number of people, and mostly within those echo chambers, Vavreck said.

“I’m pretty skeptical of the social media angle because of the self-selection into conversations on those media,” she said.

Vavreck has emerged as a respected voice in the world of presidential politics. She contributes regularly to the New York Times data-driven politics and economics blog “The Upshot,” and is a coveted local, national and international commentator on American presidential campaigns.

She’s already thinking about what 2020 will bring, this time planning to write a book on her own, without her collaborators from “Identity Crisis.” Along with Sides, she co-wrote the well-received “The Gamble:Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election.”

“I am really interested in the role of ‘authenticity’ in politics — what it is, how we can measure it, how people perceive it, whether it really does any work,” she said. “People evaluate art and music this way all the time, and I’d like to try to evaluate politicians as performers in this way.”

Indonesia’s devastating 2018 earthquake was a rare ‘supershear,’ according to UCLA-led study

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Photo of the aftermath of the earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi last September

In supershear quakes, the rupture moves faster than the shear waves, which produces more energy in a shorter time making superhsears unusually destructive.

The devastating 7.5 magnitude earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi last September was a rare “supershear” earthquake, according to a study led by UCLA researchers.

Only a dozen supershear quakes have been identified in the past two decades, according to Lingsen Meng, UCLA’s Leon and Joanne V.C. Knopoff Professor of Physics and Geophysics and one of the report’s senior authors. The new study was published Feb. 4 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Meng and a team of scientists from UCLA, France’s Geoazur Laboratory, JPL/Caltech, and the Seismological Laboratory at Caltech analyzed the speed, timing and extent of the Palu earthquake. Using high-resolution observations of the seismic waves caused by the temblor, along with satellite radar and optical images, they found that the earthquake propagated unusually fast, which identified it as a supershear.

Supershear earthquakes are characterized by the rupture in the earth’s crust moving very fast along a fault, causing the up-and-down or side-to-side waves that shake the ground — called seismic shear waves — to intensify. Shear waves are created in standard earthquakes, too, but in supershear quakes, the rupture moving faster than the shear waves produces more energy in a shorter time, which is what makes supershears even more destructive.

“That intense shaking was responsible for the widespread landslides and liquefactions [the softening of soil caused by the shaking, which often causes buildings to sink into the mud] that followed the Palu earthquake,” Meng said.

In fact, he said, the vibrations produced by the shaking of supershear earthquakes is analogous to the sound vibrations of the sonic boom produced by supersonic jets.

Photo of Lingsen Meng

Lingsen Meng

UCLA graduate student Han Bao, the report’s first author, gathered publicly available ground-motion recordings from a sensor network in Australia — about 2,500 miles away from where the earthquake was centered — and used a UCLA-developed source imaging technique that tracks the growth of large earthquakes to determine its rupture speed. The technique is similar to how a smartphone user’s location can be determined by triangulating the times that phone signals arrive at cellphone antenna towers.

“Our technique uses a similar idea,” Meng said. “We measured the delays between different seismic sensors that record the seismic motions at set locations.”

The researchers could then use that to determine the location of the rupture at different times during the earthquake.

They determined that the minute-long quake moved away from the epicenter at 4.1 kilometers per second (or about 2.6 miles per second), faster than the surrounding shear-wave speed of 3.6 kilometers per second (2.3 miles per second). By comparison, non-shear earthquakes move at about 60 percent of that speed — around 2.2 kilometers per second (1.3 miles per second), Meng said.

Previous supershear earthquakes — like the magnitude 7.8 Kunlun earthquake in Tibet in 2001 and the magnitude 7.9 Denali earthquake in Alaska in 2002 — have occurred on faults that were remarkably straight, meaning that there were few obstacles to the quakes’ paths. But the researchers found on satellite images of the Palu quake that the fault line had two large bends. The temblor was so strong that the rupture was able to maintain a steady speed around these bends.

That could be an important lesson for seismologists and other scientists who assess earthquake hazards.

“If supershear earthquakes occur on nonplanar faults, as the Palu earthquake did, we have to consider the possibility of stronger shaking along California’s San Andreas fault, which has many bends, kinks and branches,” Meng said.

Supershear earthquakes typically start at sub-shear speed and then speed up as they continue. But Meng said the Palu earthquake progressed at supershear speed almost from its inception, which would imply that there was high stress in the rocks surrounding the fault — and therefore stronger shaking and more land movement in a compressed amount of time than would in standard earthquakes.

“Geometrically irregular rock fragments along the fault plane usually act as barriers preventing earthquakes,” Meng said. “However, if the pressure accumulates for a long time — for decades or even hundreds of years — an earthquake will eventually overcome the barriers and will go supershear right away.”

Among the paper’s other authors are Tian Feng, a UCLA graduate student, and Hui Huang, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar. The UCLA researchers were supported by the National Science Foundation and the Leon and Joanne V.C. Knopoff Fund. The other authors are Cunren Liang of the Seismological Laboratory at Caltech; Eric Fielding and Christopher Milliner of JPL/Caltech and Jean-Paul Ampuero of Geoazur.

Six UCLA professors named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

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They are to be honored by the association for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue rosette pin, representing science and engineering, on Feb. 16, at the association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Fellows will be formally announced in the “AAAS News and Notes” section of the journal Science on Nov. 29.

Photo of the UCLA team that built two NASA satellites to study space weather

UCLA students launch project that’s out of this world

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Photo of the UCLA team that built two NASA satellites to study space weather

UCLA aims to be one of the few universities to ever complete such a sophisticated space science mission — designed and built by students — from beginning to end.

Five years ago, a group of UCLA undergrads came together with a common goal — to build a small satellite and launch it into space. In the years since, more than 250 students — many of whom are now UCLA graduate students and alumni — have been the mechanical engineers, software developers, thermal and power testers, electronics technicians, mission planners and fabricators of the twin Electron Losses and Fields Investigation CubeSats, known as ELFIN.

Although UCLA has been building space instruments for NASA and other international space missions for more than 40 years, and members of its faculty have been critical contributors to space science, ELFIN is the first satellite mission built, managed and operated entirely at UCLA. And even more impressive, just about all of it has been done by the students.

This week, dozens of ELFINers (a nickname earned by those who’ve worked on the satellites), will drive about 150 miles up the California coast from Los Angeles to Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, to watch the product of their effort ascend into orbit.

“Just seeing all the hundreds of hours of work, that not just myself but others too, have put into this project, the many sleepless nights, the stressing out that you’re not going to make a deadline — just seeing it go up there … I’m probably going to cry,” said Jessica Artinger, an astrophysics major and geophysics and planetary science minor who will begin her fifth year this fall.

The two micro-satellites, each weighing about eight pounds and roughly the size of a loaf of bread, will help scientists better understand magnetic storms in near-Earth space. These storms are a typical form of “space weather” that is induced by solar activity, including flares and violent solar eruptions. Some solar outbursts can impact Earth, generating large amounts of invisible electromagnetic energy that transforms our local space environment.

“Magnetic storms are not just interesting space phenomena. They can energize electrons to high energies that can damage or even destroy orbiting satellites we depend on for GPS, communications and weather monitoring,” said Margaret Kivelson, UCLA professor emeritus of space physics. “They can also enhance space electrical currents which flow onto Earth, and could damage the power grid. Space weather research is also crucial for space tourism and space exploration.”

Currently, scientists’ ability to accurately model and predict space weather is in its infancy, just like meteorology was at the turn of the last century. ELFIN will make headway toward better understanding these phenomena.

ELFIN will go up as a secondary payload with the ICESat-2 mission at dawn on Saturday, Sept. 15, aboard the trusted Delta II, the final and hopefully 100th consecutive successful launch of this type of rocket. The launch will be streamed live on NASA TV’s YouTube channel, as well as on UCLA social media (follow #uclaELFIN).

Photo of Jessica Artinger

Jessica Artinger

Following the launch, many ELFINers at Vandenberg will come back to the campus command center to eagerly await the first Bruin transmissions from space, which are expected about 10 hours after blast-off. UCLA students will be directly involved in day-to-day mission activities and will have privileged access to ELFIN’s data. They will track and command the satellite via a custom-built antenna atop Knudsen Hall and will download data directly to the mission operations center located in the Earth, planetary and space sciences department. The ELFIN website will have interactive tools so the public can track and listen to the spacecraft as it passes overhead twice a day. The CubeSats are expected to remain in space for two years, after which they will gradually fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere like shooting stars.

In fall 2017, as head of ELFIN’s fabrication team, Artinger led a small team that worked tirelessly in the EPSS prototyping lab using band saws, drill presses and a CNC machine (which is used to carve and smooth metal parts) to meticulously craft tightly toleranced components to meet their completion deadline.

“There was a lot of working things out in your head before machining it, especially for safety reasons,” said Artinger, who gave a final inspection by painstakingly sanding each part and then re-measuring each and every hole, comparing them to the technical drawings for accuracy before sending them upstairs to the mechanical team for assembly. The aerospace-grade tolerance requirement across the 13.5-inch long spacecraft, she said, was two thousandths of an inch — about half the thickness of a standard sheet of paper. The team also had to machine the sensitive energetic particle detector frames to an incredibly precise 1/10,000 of an inch, she said.

Artinger, a transfer student who graduated from Orange Coast College in 2016, plans to become a community college professor and can’t wait to use her ELFIN experience to inspire a new generation of students. She says ELFIN really opened her eyes to the power of mentoring through research and further solidified her commitment to teaching topics related to space science.

“Maybe we can discover something at the community college I’ll be working at using the actual data from the satellite that I helped build,” she said. “That would be really cool.”

Photo of Ethan Tsai

Ethan Tsai

Ethan Tsai learned about ELFIN when he was a UCLA sophomore. Despite having no background in space science, the former physics major started to work on simple tasks and gained the necessary skills to become the project’s attitude determination and control subsystem lead. Now studying for his master’s in electrical engineering, Tsai is ELFIN’s project manager.

“I was pretty honored to be able to work on a mission like this,” he said, adding that he never imagined being involved in a NASA mission as an undergraduate. “It wasn’t until about two years into the project that I started to understand and appreciate the quality of the work we were doing and how it’s going to actually affect not just our mission and the students around us but the scientific community as a whole.”

Tsai said he’s excited about the infrastructure he has helped create to make UCLA a “space campus,” supporting students who will work on future satellite missions.

The project has been supported with funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA, with technical assistance from the Aerospace Corporation among other industry partners and universities.

Diagram of ELFIN components

CubeSats like ELFIN pack instruments into a loaf-of-bread sized satellite.

Those who have witnessed the aurora borealis and australis illuminate the skies, also known as the northern and southern lights, have experienced the beauty and power of space weather, likely without even knowing it.

“The aurora is sort of a TV screen that shows us what happens out in space.” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, a UCLA space physicist who got his doctorate at UCLA and serves as ELFIN’s principal investigator. “Space physicists can tell if something interesting or important is going on in space by looking at the aurora.”

Photo of Vassilis Angelopoulos

Vassilis Angelopoulos

ELFIN aims to observe the complex sequence whereby magnetic storms form waves near Earth, accelerating and forcing electrons to fall into the atmosphere, while a network of all-sky cameras across North America captures the resulting brightening of the auroral lights. The field of space science benefits from multi-satellite missions like ELFIN because of the ever-growing need to know about the dynamic conditions in space.

“Just like with atmospheric weather,” Angelopoulos said, “you need multiple space weather buoys to feed their data into our space weather models and be able to make predictions of conditions in the future.”

CubeSats fill this need because of their compact size, relative affordability ($300,000 compared to several hundred million dollars for a typical research satellite), and how quickly a team can go from prototyping to launch compared to standard-sized satellites. CubeSats uniquely allow students to witness end-to-end satellite mission development, testing and operations all within the span of their undergraduate studies.

For ELFINers, being part of an endeavor of this magnitude is reward enough, but working on this project also has professional and scientific benefits, Angelopoulos said. In addition to the leadership, interpersonal, problem-solving and technical skills they’ve developed, ELFINers are also contributing to the production of knowledge, something that is incredibly valuable to society and to their careers as scientists and engineers.

Photo of Ethan Tsai working on flight model assembly

Ethan Tsai works on the flight model assembly for the CubeSat ELFIN.

“As a researcher it’s important to not just analyze data that others collect, but to be involved in designing your own unique experiments to explore new key science questions. This is how space science started, with experiments on small rockets where students were involved in the nuts and bolts of them, and similarly with CubeSats, this is where the future of space science education is headed now,” Angelopoulos said.

Building on the opportunities that exist here at UCLA, and knowing the impact that experiential learning can have on a student’s academic life, Angelopoulos wanted to find a way to bring CubeSat development into the undergraduate experience.

“CubeSats are ideal because they create an environment where students from all walks of life, from all disciplines, can come together and practice what they’ve learned during their formal education in the context of a realistic environment,” Angelopoulos said. “This is exactly what academia, industry and research organizations around the country need — and they tell us that. This is the kind of experience they want in people who are applying to graduate school or who are applying to work in industrial firms because these are people who think on their feet and innovate.”