With under two weeks until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris fielded questions from undecided voters during a televised CNN town hall on Wednesday.
One of those undecided voters quickly went viral, not for the question she asked Harris but for her own professional background. Carol J. Nackenoff is a professor emerita of political science at Swarthmore College. Her research interests, according to her Swarthmore bio, include “the contested meaning of citizenship” and “women’s activism.”
CNN’s moderator, Anderson Cooper, introduced Nackenoff to Harris as “a registered Democrat, who says she’s leaning towards voting for you.” Online sleuths were quick to point out that Nackenoff has for years donated to Democratic causes, including six small donations totaling $215 to the political-action committee ActBlue since June 2024, according to federal records.
That particular set of characteristics led some to question whether Nackenoff was truly undecided. “That person is more decided than me,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote of Nackenoff on X. Meanwhile, some prominent anti-Donald Trump accounts wondered how she could possibly be mulling supporting the former president.
Neither view was quite right. Nackenoff spoke to The Chronicle on Thursday about her experience at the town hall, higher education’s role in the 2024 election, and whether she’s still undecided.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you wind up participating in the town hall?
I do not know how or why I was contacted for this particular event. Some of the participants said that they had answered a survey about their views of the upcoming election, and that that was what CNN had had access to as they were looking for undecided voters. I didn’t answer any surveys. So this came to my mailbox and, of course, I was interested in the event. You had to write questions. I think that they picked [people to participate] partly on the basis of the questions that you asked. My first question was on something I cared a great deal about — Gaza, the war in the Middle East. But they said they had picked somebody else to ask a question like that, and they selected the question that I asked.
That second question, the one you ultimately asked Vice President Harris, was: “If you could accomplish only one major policy goal that required congressional action, what would it be and why?” Why were you interested in asking that?
Unless a president has overwhelming majorities in Congress, if they’re lucky, they’ll probably get one major policy initiative — if they’re really lucky, a second one. In 2008, Obama had a laundry list a mile long of things he was going to do, and there was no prioritization whatsoever that I was hearing. I was trying to get Harris to think about, “If you have limited political resources to expend political capital, what would you prioritize? What would be the highest thing on the list?” She could have answered it by saying, “Well, I don’t know what would be the absolute highest, but among the highest priorities would be ...” But she didn’t take the bait. She didn’t want to engage that question. I was disappointed about that.
As Anderson Cooper made clear, I am a registered Democrat. This is not a secret. I’m not trying to hide that. But I am angry with the Democrats over Biden’s willingness to send all sorts of weapons to Netanyahu and his generals, which they are then using to kill an enormous number of civilians. I was hoping that Harris might put some daylight between her position and Biden’s on this issue, and I’m not hearing it. But voting for Trump was not on my agenda. There are people who have jumped to that conclusion.
So you were deciding between Harris and a third-party candidate?
Or sitting it out, perhaps.
Harris was talking [in the town hall] about working with Congress, working across the aisle, finding compromise. That sounds great, but I thought that was supposed to be Biden’s big strength. Why is she going to be more successful? I’d like to hear what the strategy is. I range between frustration and anger about some of the things that I don’t believe they’re going to be able to address or are willing to address.
What does your background as a political scientist tell you about this political moment, more broadly?
I am currently teaching a lifelong-learning course on the election of 2024. It is not a course about this particular election, but what patterns we’re seeing revealed in this election, including comparisons with Western Europe and the rise of right-wing parties and authoritarianism. I’m not terribly optimistic about some of the things that I’m seeing.
I’ve been looking at all these polls indicating how much hostility there is between people who identify with different parties. It’s really getting to be frightening. I don’t know if we’re going to find common ground, especially when one candidate wants to turn political opponents into enemies within. I think that’s really dangerous.
What role do you think higher ed is playing, or should play, in this election?
I’ve retired, so I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer that question, but I think they certainly should model civility in the discussion of ideas and positions that are divergent.
There’s just an enormous amount of closed-mindedness, and we’re living in a lot of silos where we only get ideas that we already are receptive to. Of course, that is not a new observation. Cass Sunstein had a wonderful book about that some time ago, Republic.com [2001, Princeton University Press]. He’s worried about these sort of information silos and people who only are consuming things that are very close to what they already believe. This tends to produce, in some studies, greater radicalization. It pushes people to the extremes.
Is higher ed promoting the civility that you think that it should be?
I think it needs to be doing that. I’m not going to say it is or is not. As I said, I’m retired.
What would you say to someone who looks at you and says, “This is a registered Democrat who taught at a historically liberal campus. How can she be undecided?” Some people have speculated online that you were a plant.
Well, you should ask CNN how they picked people. What would I be a plant for? My question was quite straightforward. I don’t see how people wouldn’t want to know the answer to a question like that. So what in the world would I be a plant to do?
People who don’t know me, and who are just assuming that I’m considering a vote for Trump, think I can’t possibly be a serious student of the Constitution, etc., etc. I care very much about threats to democracy and the degradation of democratic norms.
Did working at Swarthmore affect your personal political views in any way?
I have enormous respect for my Swarthmore students. I think they’re very serious-minded and very thoughtful. I’ve been extraordinarily happy with the classroom experience and out-of-classroom experience working with Swarthmore students. So I’m not going to say further than that.
What also influenced my views is that I grew up in Virginia in the 1950s. I remember segregation. And the world has changed for the better in many ways. I was an optimist. I was one of these people who really did believe in progress. I am not sure I retain that faith.
Are you still undecided as of now?
I am still very unhappy, let’s put it that way. I recognize that I’m not going to get a satisfactory response to some of the things I care about. I’m just going to have to live with that, I guess.
