Elections in America.
A podcast conversation with MIT's Charles Stewart.
Charles Stewart III is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, where he has taught since 1985, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research and teaching areas include American politics congressional politics, elections, and American political development.
Professor Stewart is an established leader in the analysis of the performance of election systems and the quantitative assessment of election performance. Since 2001, Professor Stewart has been a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, a leading research effort that applies scientific analysis to questions about election technology, election administration, and election reform.
He is currently the MIT director of the project. Working with the Pew Charitable Trusts, he helped with the development of Pew’s Elections Performance Index. Professor Stewart also provided advice to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His research on measuring the performance of elections and polling place operations has been funded by Pew, the Democracy Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation. As part of this research, he was the co-editor (with Barry C. Burden) of The Measure of American Elections.
In 2017, with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Joyce Foundation, Professor Stewart established the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, which applies scientific principles to how elections are studied and administered. In 2020, he partnered with Professor Nate Persily of the Stanford Law School to establish the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.
If you had to pick one person in the United States to give you the most knowledgeable analysis of U.S. elections generally and well-informed guidance on the upcoming mid-term elections specifically, you’d probably pick Charles Stewart.
So, we called him up.
(The News Items Podcast, Episode #20: Interview with MIT Professor Charles Stewart. Recorded 17 July 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.)
This may be the worst interview you have ever done, John. No address whatsoever on how Joe Biden accomplished 81 million votes while campaigning from his basement, compared to Barack Obama’s 68 million maximum in an extraordinarily vigorous campaign.