A display of real time live social media inside the Wells Fargo Center at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 26, 2016. Credit: Gabrielle Mannino

Penn State’s Professor of Political Science Michael Berkman and Christopher Beem, the managing director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy at Penn State, penned an op-ed that was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Below is an excerpt from this article.

“With Hillary Clinton accepting the Democratic nomination in Philadelphia this week, we might expect that Americans, and especially women, are taking pride in her historic achievement as the first woman to lead a major party ticket. That is certainly what happened in 2008 when Americans of all stripes expressed pride that the nation had nominated its first African American candidate.

“Even if they did not support Barack Obama, many Americans recognized the historic nature of the election. However, a recent Mood of the Nation Poll by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy shows that going into the Democratic convention, this was not the case.

“The scientific poll posed a series of open-ended questions to a representative sample of 1,000 Americans. It allowed ordinary citizens to tell us what is on their minds without restricting them to a small number of predetermined answers.”

Read more at The Philadelphia Inquirer.