“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump said in a post on Monday on his Truth Social network.

Hours later, Vance and Trump—who had a large bandage on his right ear after Saturday’s shooting—shook hands and sat next to each other during the Republican National Convention’s opening night program in Milwaukee.

Vance, age 39, who rocketed to fame as the author of the book (and ensuing movie) Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, 2016), is the third-youngest person nominated for vice president by a major party. A former critic of Trump who once privately compared him to Hitler, Vance now aligns with the former president on several key issues. He echoed Trump’s calls to cut aid to Ukraine, deport migrants, and increase tariffs on all imported goods. 

Doubling Down on MAGA

Fordham experts said the pick is a bit unusual given Vance’s past criticism of Trump and the fact that he doesn’t bring “something different” to the ticket. Though it’s not surprising, they said, that Trump would aim to reinforce his brand of conservatism.

“Vance is very much a choice that underlines what Trump has been doing since the 2020 election, which is doubling down on the concept of MAGA as a replacement of traditional conservatism,” said Boris Heersink, Ph.D., associate professor of political science.

“Historically, it has been common for presidential candidates to try to balance the ticket in terms of intraparty disagreements. Clearly, this choice isn’t doing that.”

Jacob Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science, agrees that in Vance, Trump has chosen someone similar to himself—both in experience and policy.

“Like Trump, Vance is famous for something outside of politics and has little experience in elective office,” he said. “Sometimes, campaigns try to choose someone who adds something different, although other times, such as the Clinton/Gore campaign of 1992, a campaign will double down on a particular strength or message,” he said.

Help in Ohio?

Heersink has done research on the effect vice-presidential candidates have on elections, specifically within their home states. He said that while Vance may deliver Ohio votes, that is unlikely to have a big impact.

“Ohio has drifted so far to the Republican side that it is basically a guaranteed win for Trump regardless of who his running mate is, and additionally, Vance underperformed in Ohio in 2022 in comparison to Trump in 2020.”

Smith said Vance could perhaps “help a little bit in the Midwest, if he ends up being a strong choice, but research shows VP effects are minimal even in home states, much less regions.” He noted that a one or two-point additional performance in Ohio “could be important down-ballot though” for Ohio’s upcoming Senate and House contests.

Rhetoric Could Ramp Up

One area where Vance is expected to play a significant role is in the tone of the campaign, and there, Smith is not hopeful that he will lower the temperature of national rhetoric, as many have called for since Saturday’s attempted assasination. Within hours of the shooting, Vance blamed President Joe Biden on Twitter for the attack.

“My guess is that Trump had already decided on Vance before the shooting, or it was down to Vance and one or two others by then,” Smith said. “However, the effect of the pick will be to rachet up the temperature more.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul put a halt to the hotly debated congestion pricing plan this week, indefinitely shelving the MTA’s plan to charge drivers up to $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. 

The governor said she feared the tolling program, slated to start June 30, would “create another obstacle to our economic recovery.”

Fordham Now checked in with Annika Hinze, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program, about the impact of the 11th-hour decision. 

“Congestion pricing was always going to be an imperfect scheme, but it was also an attempt to reduce traffic in the city, as well as channel money to the MTA, which it desperately needs,” she said. 

“Now policymakers are signaling that the environmental implications of this aren’t as important as the economic implications. But in 25 years, they will have become the prime economic issues of the day.”

Shifting people from cars and trucks to public transportation is a key component to New York City’s economic health and livability, she said, as well as efforts to fight climate change. Doing that requires both a carrot—improved mass transit—as well as a stick—a tax for driving into the most congested areas of a city.

In New York City, the law that authorized congestion pricing requires it to generate $1 billion annually, which the MTA would use to finance transit construction projects. Governor Hochul said the state will pursue other ways to fund the MTA, possibly in the form of a tax on city businesses.

Hinze noted that the plan had some quirks that had not been addressed well (or at all), so there was some understandable frustration among residents. 

“A congestion pricing scheme would have been much more justifiable in a metro area with a sophisticated and broadly accessible public transit system with trains, light rail, and buses,” she said.

“But even [in a city]with such a transit system in place, like London, congestion pricing was always going to be unpopular with some. It is inconvenient for some commuters to have such a system in place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the ‘wrong’ thing to do,” she said.

“It would’ve been a big signal to say, ‘We’re going to prioritize this, even if it’s unpopular because it’s the right thing to do.”

“It would have signaled, ‘We’re going to invest in and expand public transit infrastructure.”

Many have criticized the governor’s sudden reversal, noting that as recently as two weeks ago she said congestion pricing was critical to “making cities more livable.” Hinze said she thinks Hochul’s motivations to end the program were political. 

“It’s an election year. I assume that she looked at the polling and said, ‘Look, this is not the right time to push for this,’” she said, noting that a Siena College poll from April found that 72% of New York suburban residents opposed congestion pricing. 

That includes House districts that Democrats lost in the 2022 elections. Shelving the plan potentially helps Democrats win those races and win back the House of Representatives in November. 

“In a lot of districts down-ballot, Republicans are doing quite well, in particular on Long Island where congestion pricing is particularly unpopular,” Hinze said.  

Hinze thinks the program may not be dead for good.  The program has already been authorized by the New York State Legislature, and the MTA has already spent $555 million on the infrastructure for the program.

“My hope is that maybe it will not be indefinitely postponed. After the election, we can revisit it; maybe there will be better proposals, and some of the snags will be resolved, so we can pass something that’s better,” she said.

In 2020, Lukashenka was elected to a sixth term in an election that was marred by widespread electoral fraud. Protesters took to the streets, and an estimated 6,000 were jailed and tortured by the government. Thousands were forced to flee the country.

In June, Nikolayenko traveled to Poland and Lithuania for three months to interview natives of Belarus, a country of 9.3 million people bordering Russia and Ukraine.

“People in the United States sometimes forget how elections are not something that you can take for granted,” said Nikolayenko, a professor of political science whose research focuses on social movements and comparative democratization in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

“They’re not something that just falls from the sky. They’re something that people fight for and, in some cases, lose their lives.”

Nikolayenko had previously written about the “staggering level of mobilization” that materialized in the aftermath of the 2020 election in Belarus, despite the extreme danger participants faced, and focused on the role of emotions in generating mass mobilization.

A grant from the U.S. Department of State and support from the American Councils for International Education allowed her to travel to the region, and the European Humanities University in Lithuania and the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences provided administrative support.

Nikolayenko conducted in-depth interviews with 23 industrial workers and other members of trade unions. Past protests against the government had mostly attracted university students and white-collar workers, but in 2020, blue-collar workers joined in large numbers, and as a result, many of those same workers were forced to flee the country.

She said most of the political movements she’s studied over the years were carefully planned years before elections, but this one was more spontaneous and was driven by feelings of injustice.

“I was interested in understanding why some industrial workers joined while others did not and why the level of labor mobilization was higher at some state enterprises than others,” she said.

Nikolayenko will publish her findings in an academic journal in the future, but in the meantime, she’s sharing the lessons in Youth and Politics, a course she’s teaching undergraduates this semester.

Class discussions range from the ethics of interviewing to the role of the students’ generation in preserving democracy. The latter is especially important now, given the erosion of democratic norms in Europe and the United States, she said.

“Given what is happening in the United States right now, with the level of polarization and populism and everything else, it’s important to stress the idea that the quality of democracy is something that cannot be taken for granted,” Nikolayenko said.

“People need to take a very active stance and remain engaged in politics, and the people of Belarus are trying to do it in very precarious conditions.”

Beyond the death toll, millions of people have been injured and displaced. The United Nations said that the earthquake had affected as many as 5.3 million in Syria alone. And for Turkey, the situation is all too familiar: Turkey sits atop two major fault lines and has suffered major earthquakes before. In 1999, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake was blamed for an estimated 18,000 deaths.

Complicating the current crisis is the fact that the area of Northern Syria impacted by the earthquake has been riven by violence for the past decade due to the county’s ongoing civil war. The war, which grew out of the wider Arab Spring protests of 2011, has left northern sections of the country in the hands of rebels opposed to Bashar al-Assad, the country’s leader.

To shed light on the complexities of this ongoing catastrophe, Fordham News spoke with experts in international humanitarian aid, the Middle East, and mental health.

Politics and Aid

Anjali Dayal, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and a senior scholar in residence at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.

The aid situation in Syria is deeply dependent on United Nations Security Council politics because the region in Syria that was hardest hit has been part of complex international negotiations about the passage of aid. The U.N. is an intergovernmental organization, and under the terms of the U.N. Charter, the Syrian government has ultimate authority over the area–but the northwest part of the country remains locked in an ongoing civil war, where the Syrian government’s authority is contested on the ground. The politics of U.N. aid passing into this part of Syria have become really complicated, as a result.

Over the years, the negotiations in the Security Council, where Russia has veto power, narrowed down the number of open crossings to a single one in northwest Syria, Bab al-Hawa, which was badly hit by this earthquake.

Thankfully, after a closed-door U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that the Syrian government has agreed to allow two more border crossings between Syria and Turkey to open up for three months [to allow for]  humanitarian relief to the earthquake-struck zones.

This is important because it means that the international community [including the U.N.]  can get aid to a part of Syria [run by the anti-al-Assad rebels]  where the Syrian government is more than happy to let people die. There are local organizations on the ground that cross through other crossings, but nobody really has the scale or reach that the U.N. does for the volume of aid that’s necessary at this moment in particular. That’s why this has become so contentious.

So a huge crisis like this really highlights how important it is to have concerted multilateral abilities to respond right away in the service of people who really need the best assistance that they can get.

Consequences of Corruption and Civil War

Melissa Labonte, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and a faculty affiliate of Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs

I would describe this as sort of a tale of two humanitarian crisis responses. In Turkey, you have a capable state, but it’s a state that is sclerotic and has been plagued by corruption. Anyone who has traveled to Turkey in the last few years has seen huge construction projects that have been doled out as political favors to loyalists of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party. You have buildings that have not been built to code, in areas that are very close to the fault lines. This was a recipe for disaster.

The other is Syria, where prior decisions stemming from the Civil War mean that in an area with about 11 million people in it, more than half are internally displaced persons from other parts of Syria.
Most people understand that the Syrian Civil Defense Force, or “white helmets,” have been working in this area for a really long time with very little assistance from the outside world.

You’ve got millions of people who are now living in structures that were decimated by the war. They have no food, no shelter, no medicine, and no water. It’s that last element that is going to turn that part of the post-earthquake crisis into one where the death toll is going to start to mount catastrophically. Because what’s going to happen next is there’ll be a massive outbreak of cholera.

As an international community, we have to come to the recognition that things are so deeply interconnected. Our failure to deal with crises like Syria and our failure to cultivate a more responsive democracy in Turkey are the antecedent conditions that lead to the inability or the unwillingness of regimes to respond effectively to their populations.

‘Recovery Will Take Time’: The Importance of Ongoing Donations

Selin Gülgöz, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology who lived in Istanbul from 1993 until 2009, when she moved to the United States for graduate school. Her family still lives there today.

Istanbul wasn’t affected directly by this earthquake, but we did live through the major earthquake back in 1999, where the epicenter was a little bit outside of the city. I was very fortunate at that time that our family was unaffected, but it’s hard to remain unaffected even if your close ones are not hurt. I was 11 at the time, so it was quite traumatizing.

It’s estimated that this earthquake has impacted roughly 15 million people. Turkey as a whole country has about 80 million. So that’s a huge percentage of the population.

Most of my efforts so far have been trying to raise awareness of some of the local organizations that have been there from day one, and are often faster than governmental organizations.

There are two that have a proven record of trust and professionalism, are reliable, fast-acting, and have networks in Turkey on the ground: Turkish Philanthropy’s Turkish Earthquake Relief Effort; and Bridge to Turkiye’s Earthquake Relief Fund.

Right now, 30,000 people have died and the number is expected to rise. Even more have been displaced, including children who have lost their families, so monthly contributions are encouraged, as healing and recovery will take time.

An Event That Affects the Whole Region

Samantha Slattery, FCRH ’15, GSAS ’19, Regional Programmes Officer for Jesuit Refugee Service in Beiruit, Lebanon. Slattery earned an M.S. in humanitarian studies at Fordham.

I work with projects addressing the crisis in Lebanon, which has the highest refugee population per capita in the world. Our office supports JRS teams in Syria in Aleppo and Homs, and right now they’re helping with emergency distributions, especially winterization materials because it’s very cold here right now. Anyone who wants to help our teams can do so by donating here.

The difficulty that all organizations are experiencing right now in Syria is that a lot of aid workers and volunteers there have also already experienced multiple traumas from the war. Now they’ve survived this earthquake, and many have suffered their own personal losses.

In Lebanon, the earthquake woke us up from our sleep here, and luckily, it missed us. But people are still affected here. So many of the people we work with have lost loved ones in Aleppo. It affects the whole region.

A concern that I have is that international attention could wane. Right now there’s a big effort from the international community to respond to these crises, but once crises become protracted, the eyes of the world look away to new emergencies.

Focusing on Mental Health

Lynne Jones, child psychiatrist and course director for the program on Mental Health in Complex Emergencies at Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs

I hope that this will shake people into their senses and realize that human beings are human beings, and they need their basic needs addressed. I would add to that list the emotional need for connection. Whether somebody has died or not died, everybody has experienced loss. If it’s compounded by the loss of a loved person, of course, it’s much worse, but even if you haven’t lost a person, you’ve lost the environment in which you’ve lived. You’ve lost any sense of security, you’ve lost all your belongings.

Imagine you’re standing there and everything around you has been destroyed. What you need is to be reconnected with people that are familiar to you and reestablish as quickly as possible some kind of structure and routine in your life. And, these two things will really help you address the other issues of maintaining your physical health.

I’ve written guidelines with others for both the COVID pandemic and the Ukraine crisis on how we can support children who have suffered a bereavement. We’re adapting them now. The key points are, to tell the truth in a way that’s appropriate to a child’s developmental age and to make sure that they have continuous loving care.

The gathering, which took place in two sessions in the Lowenstein Center’s 12th-Floor Lounge, featured 32 students who shared the results of their research with friends and colleagues.

“It feels so great. It really feels like a relief to be able to gather in a room and talk to students about their research,” said Rebecca Stark-Gendrano, Ph.D., assistant dean for juniors and transfer students.

“We’ve had Zoom events the last two years, and those were a reasonable substitute, but there really is nothing like having the energy that comes from being together in one room.”

Stark-Gendrano said that social justice was a common factor in many of this year’s presentations, but that the projects spanned many disciplines.

Disinformation Through the Years

Inspired in part by his experience interning with NBC News/MSNBC in 2019 and 2020, Gabe Samandi, an international studies major, presented “A general history and theory of Mind Control,” which he completed under the mentorship of Mathias Klang, Ph.D., professor of communications and media studies.

The idea for the project, which traces the history of techniques associated with misinformation and manipulation of public perception since the 1950s, came to him when he started hearing people saying that critical race theory (CRT) was being taught in elementary schools. He had studied critical race theory during his time in Fordham’s study abroad program at the University of Pretoria in 2020.

“I can assure you it’s not,” said Samandi, who studied CRT during Fordham’s Ubuntu program in 2020, between his two internships at NBC News/MSNBC.

“I had to go all the way to South Africa to learn about it. So I was really curious about how misinformation could spread so quickly,” he said.

Critical race theory is not being taught in elementary schools, but anti-racist curriculum is, and the two are being conflated in disinformation campaigns.

“A lot of conspiracy theories and misinformed narratives actually end up having a lot of grains of truth, and, interestingly, common roots in real historical events that have historically gone ignored or underreported.”

One example, he said, is Operation Paperclip. The secret United States intelligence program featured the U.S. government recruitment of more than 1,600 Nazi German scientists, engineers, and technicians after the end of World War II, for work in the Cold War arms race. It has been a common starting point for a lot of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories, including QAnon, because it’s held up as proof of the U.S. government’s willingness to work with criminals.

“I wanted to provide a historical record about some of the common routes of these conspiracy theories and set the record straight about some of the most confusing and truly alarming aspects of the history of psychological and information warfare in the United States,” he said.

Koreans who Call Japan Home

In addition to a posterboard, Kia Fatahi Faz Abad, also an international studies major, had on display newspapers from his visit to Japan this past summer. He traveled to Tokyo to conduct ethnographic research on ‘Zainichi Koreans’ — Koreans who migrated to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea and have lived there since the early 1920s, along with their descendants. His finished project “What’s It Like Being Korean in Japan? The Complex Identity of Zainichi,” was overseen by Asato Ikeda, Ph.D., associate professor of art history.

Abad visited 10 schools in Tokyo that were originally established to promote the teachings of former North Korean president Kim Il-sung, and interviewed Zainichi people. But the idea that because the Zainichi attend the schools, they are ideologically tied to North Korea, is a misconception held by many Japanese.

“They have transitioned from the ideological education, and are more tied to the perseverance of the Korean identity as a whole, dating back to when Japan occupied Korea,” he said.

That’s because even though many Zainichi were born in Japan and have spent their whole lives there, in the eyes of the Japanese state, they are still Korean.

“If you’re born in America, you receive an American passport, and you’re considered American, regardless. But in Japanese immigration law, they view you as Korean,” he said.

“This creates a much more complicated identity. Zainichi have suffered discrimination and also hate speech from right-wing parties and Japanese nationalists. They are not viewed as a different ethnic identity, but as a foreigner.”

The Zainichi’s plight begs the question: What does it mean to have a homeland that you’ve never visited? For Abad, whose parents are from Japan and Iran, the question was worth the hassle of COVID-related travel restrictions that made the trip challenging.

“It was one of the most important life lessons for me. This was the first time I’ve conducted independent research. It took a lot of paperwork, but it worked.”

A More Inclusive Dining Experience

Hannah Kang, an English major, and Sayema Abedin, a political science major working on an M.A. in ethics and society stayed close to home for their research. In “Islamic Foodways: Texts, Cultures, and the Practical-Political Ethics of Campus Dining,” they detailed the ways they felt that Fordham could improve dining for Muslim students such as Abedin.

For the research, which they conducted under the guidance of associate theology professor Christiana Zenner, Ph.D., the students surveyed schools and universities in New York City to better understand how they accommodate Muslim students. They also explored ways to help non-Muslims understand the importance of Halal food, which is available at the Lincoln Center campus.

“Instead of thinking of it as a restriction, we want people to think of it as a lifestyle. Our main goal is to just educate everyone on what it is, and why we follow these rules,” said Abedin.

“We also talk about the social lives of students, and how we can make them feel more comfortable.”

Although the University has made strides to welcome Muslim students to campus, Kang and Abedin said additional steps to improve the dining experience, including lowering the price of Halal meals, and making them more widely available. They are also advocating for separate prayer rooms for men and women and a Wudu station, which allows for washing before prayers.

Kang said they interviewed students from Fordham’s Muslim Students Association and contacted the Interfaith center of New York City, which provided them with policy proposals for K-12 schools.

“We would love to conduct more quantitative work, but for this moment, this was just making sure we have a foundation for others who want to do further research,” she said.

Peeking into the Brain

Across the room, Rabia Gondur, an integrated neuroscience major, shared the findings of “Left-handedness and language: A brainwave analysis of semantic processing and familial left-handedness.”

Her research, which she conducted under the supervision of Sarah Grey, Ph.D., assistant professor of Spanish and linguistics, featured 25 volunteers who were asked to read sentences while their event-related potential (ERP) waveforms were measured.

In the majority of the population, language is thought to be predominantly controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, but in left-handed, or familial sinistral people, it’s thought to be controlled by the right hemisphere. The effect is thought to also affect blood relatives of left-handed people, a phenomenon known as familial sinistrality. This means they process language in a fundamentally different way.

The goal of the study was to see the effects of familial sinistrality on language processing in real-time, via ERP waveforms. In the experiment, participants visited Grey’s Rose Hill campus lab, and were asked to read a sentence aloud. Familial sinistrals were expected to show a greater N400 brainwave activity while those who were non-familial sinsitrals were excepted to show smaller P600 or N400 waves.

Because the research was interrupted by the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, the number of participants who were familial sinistrals was lower than ideal, and as a result, Gondur said she didn’t get enough results to make a firm conclusion about familial sinistral participants. She was still excited to talk about the work in person though.

“While we weren’t able to see a lot of significant results for our familial sinistral group, we were able to see that non-familiar sinistrals showed a bigger P 600 response. This shows that they use a different mechanism to process semantic information. They look at grammar cues to pick up semantic information.”

She said that while some people prefer Zoom, she feels it’s easier to be in person.

“Because I talk so fast, and I don’t know if everyone knows the terms and stuff, this gives me enough time to explain them,” she said.

But on that day, German leadership agreed to double its defense budget, to 84 billion Euros (roughly $91 billion), and it also authorized a one-time expenditure of 100 billion Euros to modernize its armed forces, signifying that if NATO countries were to get involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Germany would be ready.

In another first, the country also sent weapons to Ukraine and authorized other countries to send German-made weapons there as well.

For Annika Hinze, Ph.D. an associate professor of political science, the director of Fordham’s Urban Studies program, and a native of Germany, the change of heart couldn’t come soon enough.

Q: Were you surprised that Putin decided to invade Ukraine?

A: No, I don’t think I was. Especially in the last few weeks leading up to it, I think the West was completely asleep and quite frankly, I was really angry. I was angry to see the way that especially German foreign policy was dealing with this. There’s a German phrase Wandel durch Handel, which means “peace through trade.” It’s based on this old but very flawed theory that countries that are engaged in trade relations don’t go to war with each other. But I think all of that is out of the window now.

The German foreign minister said on Thursday, when Putin marched into Ukraine with a full-scale invasion, that she was outraged that Putin had lied to her face and had lied to the face of the German chancellor. Really, are you really surprised? How many times has he lied before?

Q: Do you think Europeans want Germany to get involved?

A: It’s the largest scale conflict on European soil since the end of World War II. All of European policy has tried to work toward preventing any sort of conflict in the European theater again, especially on that scale.

This is different because it’s a full-scale invasion by a former superpower of a sovereign, outspokenly pro-Western democracy. But when we talk about countries like Hungary and Poland, there’s that old ghost of Russia. There are still people alive who remember the Soviets very forcefully overthrowing uprisings for democracy in Eastern bloc countries and, suppressing public opinion and freedom of expression.

As someone from a former aggressor nation, I know my grandma’s stories about World War II. It’s something that’s very vivid still in a lot of Europeans, and especially for Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians, who were invaded by the Nazis, then invaded by the Soviets. And now they’re once again being invaded, by the Russians.

Q: Why do you think Germany has been slow to respond, and what impact does that have on Europe and NATO countries?

A: It’s been very frustrating to see German silence on so many issues. It doesn’t just concern Russia; it’s so many conflicts around the world, or in front of the German doorstep. I think that the European Union should have spoken more forcefully toward violations of human rights and freedom of expression in Hungary, for instance, where we’ve seen a rapid progression towards authoritarianism.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated, [the magazine]Foreign Policy had an article on whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel could replace any American leader as the leader of the free world. It became quite clear that Germany could not fill that position, even though it’s one of the strongest economies in the world. It could not fill that void because the German military is basically defunct right now. They have a lot of work to do before they get back to even a basic defense army.

This was for good reason, of course. The Western allies and the Soviets really didn’t want a strong Germany at the center of Europe again [after World War II], and Germany had to prove its peaceful intentions. But Germans have been too successfully taught not to be aggressors anymore.

Q: How deeply embedded in the German psyche is this importance of not getting involved in war or military conflict?

A: It’s part of our school system. We talk about the Holocaust, we visit concentration camps. There’s been a serious effort to confront in the collective memory what has happened and what Germany did specifically, not just in terms of two wars of aggression, but also in terms of mass genocide at the heart of Europe. That’s allowed a lot of Germans to say, ‘OK, we’re smarter than that now. We’ll never go to war anymore because war is unnecessary and we’re all pacifists.’ But you can’t really be a pacifist without weapons. And that sounds horrible, but I think in today’s world, that is just the truth. If you don’t have any weapons for collective defense, then you can’t keep the peace, especially not against aggressors like Putin.

Q: Do you feel like Putin’s aggression has spurred Germany to take on a leadership role in the world militarily?

A: It’s really too early to say where it will go. But I think the fact that they will then sit on a military that is going to be considerable on a world scale will put them in a position where they’re going to have to make decisions like that. It’s quite amazing that the German Bundestag made its announcement last Sunday, and in response, almost 500,000 people staged a protest against Putin in downtown Berlin. They did it to say we support what has just been decided.

That was really mind-blowing because very suddenly, there’s not just been a turn just in politics, but a turn in public opinion. Suddenly German political leadership has public opinion behind it on this, which has really never had happened since the end of World War II.

Such was the lesson at “Political Discourse in a Polarized Age,” a panel discussion that took place Thursday, Oct. 7, at the Lincoln Center campus. The gathering, which was the first of eight that Fordham will hold this year, featured television journalist George Stephanopoulos; pollster and author Kristen Soltis Anderson; Robert Talisse, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University; and Roshni Nedungadi, a partner at HIT Strategies.

Monika McDermott, Ph.D., professor of political science, moderated the afternoon discussion.

Talisse said political polarization, which is the ideological distance between the two major political parties, is the best-known form of polarization. There’s also belief polarization, which happens between like-minded people and causes them to become more extreme versions of themselves.

“As we shift into our more extreme selves with our allies, our views about our partisan opponents also shift. We come to see them as incomprehensible, irrational, untrustworthy, dangerous, unpatriotic, lazy, benighted, ill, and in need of diagnosis rather than argument,” he said.

We also adopt more demanding standards for authentic membership in our group and expel members for reasons of impurity. Representative Liz Cheney, who was ousted from her leadership role in the Republican Party in May, is a perfect example of this, he said.

Stephanopoulos agreed that there is more emphasis on politicians catering exclusively to the most extreme elements of their base.

‘It used to be a common technique to point out to a politician or policymaker, ‘Here’s what you said six months ago,’ or ‘What you just said is not true,” he said.

“They don’t care anymore. It doesn’t matter at all. They don’t feel the need to respond in a way that addresses the other side; they just go ahead and play to their own. “

Anderson said the research shows that on policy issues, there is more agreement among liberal voters and conservative ones than one might expect.

“There are quite a number of Americans who take a little from column A and a little from column B and construct their worldview,” she said.

The problem is the deep fear each side has for each other.

“Both sides fundamentally misunderstand the other side’s capabilities and intentions,” she said, noting that Republicans and Democrats both believe the other is bent on making the country a worse place. Equally importantly, both believe the other has the ability to make it happen, be it through Republicans’ control of their state governments and the Supreme Court, or Democrats’ control of Congress and the Presidency, as well as alliances in the entertainment and media industry.

“If you believe the other side has bad intentions and a ton of power to make good on them, you suddenly begin to justify an “ends justifies the means” attitude,” she said.

Nedungadi focused on research on 18- to 40-year-olds, which shows they have not embraced partisanship as much as their elders. Only 8% of millennials considered themselves strong Republicans, and only 16% are strong Democrats.

They may seem polarized because they are involved in protest and activism, she said, but that’s because they’re poorly represented in Congress—millennials make up about 6% of Congress, but millennials and Generation Z are 37% of the electorate. Baby boomers make up 28% of the eligible voting population but represent 56% of Congress.

She agreed with Anderson that 18- to 40-year olds do not form an identity around specific policies.

“We ran a focus group with young folks earlier this week asking about Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, and none of them could point to any provisions within that bill could help them,” she said.

“They just knew either they were for or against it, based on whatever politician they were following at the time.”

Stephanopoulos was skeptical that the “feedback loops” that are generated by politicians and the media can be overcome.

“Even though I completely agree with advocating the need for listening, right now we can’t even come to an agreement on a common set of facts around which to have a conversation,” he said.

He noted that a recent survey found that 61% of white Republicans believe that the last presidential election was stolen. That included 35 percent with college degrees.

“That’s a stunning number for something that is completely untrue. Are these people who are incapable of telling fact from fiction? I don’t think so, but it’s what they’re being told every single day, and it’s being reinforced by the political and the media culture. I don’t know how to break that,” he said.

A common lament was that there are few places left for Americans of different ideological stripes to get to know one another. Stephanopoulos noted that schools and churches do not bring people together, as Americans now live in more ideologically homogenous towns.

Media is incentivized to divide as well, he said, and although the partisan tilts of cable networks are well known, social networks are part of the problem as well. Whether it’s Facebook or Tik Tok, panelists agreed that users are more likely to receive tailored news that’s been created just to reinforce their opinions.

Talisse bemoaned the way the phrase “do the research” has taken root on social media in response to things like the COVID vaccine, and is indicative of a vicious, closed feedback loop.

“What does that word “research” mean on social media? It means that you’ve scrolled through enough Google results or through your timeline, to find enough people to affirm the thing you are already inclined to believe so that now you feel justified in escalating your confidence in that thing,” he said.

“It’s not research, it’s me-search.”

Guests for the panel were allowed to remove their masks provided they were vaccinated and had received a negative COVID 19 test within 24 hours of the event. 

What are some of the reasons why you decided to attend Fordham?
A major selling point of Fordham for me was definitely the ability to have both a traditional campus feel while having access to the many resources a major city provides. At the Rose Hill campus, I loved the idea of being able to travel to other boroughs and explore different cultures, landmarks, and entertainment opportunities, and at the same time being able to spend a sunny day relaxing on Eddies Parade with my friends. The possibilities were endless both on and off campus, making Fordham the perfect choice.

I also gravitated toward the small class sizes offered at Fordham. With most classes having only about 25 students, I saw myself being a true part of the University, actively engaging with peers and professors about larger issues facing the world. Fordham was dedicated to seeing its students grow as both individuals and as members of a larger community—one that I am proud to be a part of.

What do you think you got at Fordham that you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere?
Fordham allowed me to meet so many wonderful and interesting people from completely different walks of life. Particularly as a political science major, I was always surrounded by diverse experiences and perspectives, and the ability to have constructive conversations on complicated issues with my peers was amazing. In a larger sense, the Fordham community is so incredibly strong and supportive. Fordham students care for and support one another, and the friends I have made will always mean something special.

Did you take any courses or have any experiences that helped put you on your current path?
While not directly related to what I am doing now, my three years at the RamLine call center [reaching out to Fordham alumni and parents of current Fordham students]taught me many important skills and gave me valuable insight into the kinds of work I want to do in the future. As both a student caller and a supervisor, I learned strategies to successfully engage with individuals with vastly different experiences than I [have], listening to them and meeting them where they are at so that they know they are understood and appreciated. More importantly, working at the call center made me realize how proud I was to be a Fordham student. There was never a point when talking about my job or life at school felt forced, and every call was just another opportunity to talk about the people, classes, and opportunities I loved so much. Having graduated, I want to be able to work somewhere and say that I have a true passion for what I’m doing.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Professor Diane Detournay taught the introductory course to my American studies minor, and it ended up becoming one of the most important experiences I had at Fordham. I think there is a tendency to present U.S. history to kids in simplistic terms, and before coming to college I had never really sat down and considered the larger issues that have and continue to shape America and its people. In Diane’s class, we were primarily tasked with having these conversations, thinking about the institutions and structures in society we take for granted, and how they shape the America we live in today. Never had I had a professor so passionate about the work they were doing, wanting her students to challenge conventional thinking and advocate for needed change. Diane taught me about my duty to be good citizen, and the ideas she presented will always [stay]with me.

What are you doing now, and what do you hope to accomplish, personally or professionally?
Right now, I’m working in the development office of my high school creating communications and media strategies. I am responsible for designing content on our platforms that tells the story of the school while encouraging our immediate and broader communities (alumni, parents, friends) to continue feeling engaged and supporting our mission. Curating our social media presence and publishing articles on our website and in our magazine have been some of my most recent responsibilities.

At night, I am pursuing a graduate degree from Fordham in elections and campaign management. The program has given me a wide look into the opportunities to work in politics, and with the current work I am doing, I am hoping to get involved in the communications planning for candidates running for office.

What are you optimistic about?
I’m optimistic about the kind of world my generation can create. Particularly now, we have seen young people be so passionate about the issues they are fighting for, and [be]truly invested in making the world a better place for all of us. My peers and I care deeply about one another and advocate for our collective well-being, and it is that mindset that will always give me hope.

Anything else we should know about you, your plans, or your Fordham connection?
I’m excited for the day we can come back to campus and celebrate the end of my senior year. This year was certainly not what anyone was expecting, so I look forward to reconnecting with classmates I haven’t seen in a while and experiencing [what]we would have had in May.

This fall, she began a master’s degree program in higher education and student affairs at the New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Along with her coursework, she was matched with a graduate assistantship at Columbia University’s Office of Student Life. “Everybody in the Office for Student Involvement [at Fordham]helped me cultivate my own understanding of what student affairs means and find my passion,” Peay says.

What are some of the reasons why you decided to attend Fordham?
One of the things that really resonated with me were the Jesuit tenets of education and what it meant to be part of a Jesuit community. I had the opportunity to come with both of my parents. My mom and I are sitting next to each other listening to [former Fordham College at Lincoln Center dean]Father Grimes speak about what it meant to have a Jesuit education and what it meant to be involved at Fordham and what it meant to just generally be a student of New York City. He is a wonderful speaker and just really blew us both away. So it was kind of a combination, I guess, of Jesuit education, being in the city, knowing that [Fordham offers] a lot of different majors, knowing that I could be part of a small community, and really just some of the things that Father Grimes said about the power of the Fordham community at Lincoln Center, specifically.

What do you think you got at Fordham that you maybe would not have gotten elsewhere?
I think the biggest thing that I got out of Fordham that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else was just the breadth of mentorship network. I got the best of both worlds knowing and participating in academics and student involvement at both Lincoln Center and Rose Hill, and a lot of people were really invested in me as a student and invested in my academic career. I am still in touch with a lot of the administrators I worked with in the Office for Student Involvement. We chat about grad school and classes and all of these things. That’s one of the things that I think I cherish the most out of my Fordham experience: the number of people I met who genuinely care about students.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
I would probably say Zein Murib in political science. I had four classes with them [Murib]—American Social Movements, Interest Group Politics, Judicial Politics, and Politics of Sex and Sexuality in the United States—and they were all very, very interesting classes. I think I learned the most in those classes because of the ways the topics were so far-reaching and applicable to so many different things. They really gave me a deeper appreciation of living in New York.

Was there one particular moment when you realized you had a certain talent for student affairs work, and how did that feel?
It took me sitting back and thinking about the things that really did bring me joy and what I was really interested in and excited about at Fordham. Under the guidance of some of the people from the Office for Student Involvement, I started exploring the idea of getting a master’s in student affairs in higher education, because I realized that the things that I was most passionate about were giving back to the community and helping students find their place at Fordham and build their own community. It was something that I had struggled with freshman year, so I wanted to be a vehicle and vessel of knowledge for them at Fordham rather than just kind of move on.

What are you optimistic about?
I would say the thing that I’m most optimistic about is kind of personal; it’s more the possibilities of community building in the time of COVID, because we’re in a time where so many people are remote and so many people are digital, and not everybody is in the place that they feel most comfortable or the place that they call home. I’ve really found that, especially with my friends who are still juniors or seniors at Fordham or who have just graduated, we all are really looking for community and time to spend with each other. I think coming out of this time, we will all be a lot closer.

I would say I’m also optimistic about the state of New York City as a whole. I love being able to go outside and see people dressed up in their COVID getups, and they’re really taking it seriously, just remembering that we are part of a community as a city that is handling this all together and working together to make it better. I feel so much better and happier about being in New York than I did when I was in California, because you can feel that energy and feel the community support that is here.

Elsa Au-Yeung

School: Fordham College at Rose Hill

Major: Biological Sciences

Minor: Bioethics

Current Job: Research Associate, Inflammation and Immunology, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

“One of the things I am the most grateful for from my experience at Fordham was actually learning about things not related to my major. Since we are required to take the core curriculum, I was exposed to so many different classes I never would have taken otherwise. These courses refined the way I think about virtually everything. Buddhism in America helped me discover my interest in Buddhism, and Intro to Bioethics challenged many preconceived beliefs I had about the health care industry and controversial ethicists.”

Read more of Elsa Au-Yeung’s story.

Reed Bihary

School: Gabelli School of Business

Major: Business Administration

Concentrations: Finance, Global Business

Minor: Economics

Current Job: Corporate and Institutional Banking Development Program Associate, PNC Financial Services

“Through the Gabelli School of Business, I was immediately taught the importance of networking, which helped me land multiple internships and gain a better understanding of which profession I wanted to pursue after graduation. The Fordham Mentoring Program helped to prepare me for interviews and expand my professional network. Connections I made with alumni through this program were pivotal in aligning me with the job I have today.”

Read more of Reed Bihary’s story.

Natalie Migliore

School: Fordham College at Rose Hill

Major: Journalism

Minor: Communication and Media Studies

Current Job: News Anchor/Writer, iHeartMedia

“Working at WFUV was hands down the best decision I ever made. It changed the trajectory of my life. I was going to be a business major, and walking into WFUV, I just fell in love with journalism. I wouldn’t have known about the position at iHeartMedia if it weren’t for having a connection from Fordham and WFUV. That reinforced [the importance of the]alumni network. Another thing I wouldn’t have gotten almost anywhere else was the small class sizes at Fordham. I built great relationships with my professors, and they’ve become great mentors to me.”

Read more of Natalie Migliore’s story.

John Morin

School: Fordham College at Rose Hill

Major: Political Science

Minors: American Studies, Mathematics

Current Job and Studies: Communications Associate, Regis High School; M.A. Candidate, Elections and Campaign Management, Fordham

“I was always surrounded by diverse experiences and perspectives, and the ability to have constructive conversations on complicated issues with my peers was amazing. The intro course for my American studies minor was one of the most important experiences I had. The professor, Diane Detournay, wanted us to challenge conventional thinking and advocate for needed change. The ideas she presented in class, I will always carry with me.”

Read more of John Morin’s story.

Finley Peay

School: Fordham College at Lincoln Center

Majors: Political Science, American Studies

Concentration: American Catholic Studies

Minor: Theology

Current Studies and Job: M.A. Candidate, Higher Education and Student Affairs, NYU; Graduate Assistant, Columbia University’s Office of University Life

“The biggest thing that I got out of Fordham was the breadth of the mentorship network. I got the best of both worlds participating in academics and student involvement at both Lincoln Center and Rose Hill. I’m still in touch with a lot of the administrators I worked with in the Office for Student Involvement. That’s one of the things I cherish the most: the number of people I met who genuinely care about students.”

Read more of Finley Peay’s story.

Julie Tin

School: Fordham College at Lincoln Center

Major: Psychology

Minor: Mandarin Chinese

Current Job: Human Resources Administrative Assistant, University Settlement, The Door, Broome Street Academy Charter High School

“Right now I work for a family of New York City organizations that give back to immigrant and low-income communities and provide services to disconnected youth. I had interned there during college, but I had little to no experience in the office setting before I was placed in Fordham’s Office of Alumni Relations for work-study. Through the staff’s guidance and instruction, I was able to develop data management, communication, and organizational skills that serve as the core of my professional abilities.”

Read more of Julie Tin’s story.

—Reporting by Chris Gosier, Adam Kaufman, Kelly Kultys, and Sierra McCleary-Harris

In a new Fordham News podcast, political science professor Monika McDermott, Ph.D., explains why it’s essential that we make plans to vote right now. McDermott, Ph.D., the director of Fordham’s master’s program in elections and campaign management. taught the first cohort of students enrolled in the Graduate School of Arts and Science’ advanced certificate in public opinion and survey research this past spring. Their capstone project was the Fordham poll, a survey designed to address areas of American life that had been overlooked by most pollsters and was retooled to reflect life during the pandemic.

For information about early voting and absentee voting in your state, visit USA.gov/absentee-voting.
For information on early voting in New York City, visit vote.nyc/page/early-voting-information.
To learn about provisional ballots, visit this explainer at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Listen below

Full transcript below:

Monika McDermott: It’s really going to be a trial for our democratic system, and how much confidence people have in our government and how much confidence people have in our voting system. And that’s what we’re waiting to see, is how it all plays out.

Patrick Verel: This fall was always going to be a tumultuous time for the United States thanks to a nationwide election on November 3rd that will determine who will be president next year. But with less than 40 days left until election day, the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging, making it even more challenging. It’s not clear how safe it will be for most Americans to vote in person, and although many states have successfully held elections via mail and vote, there are real questions about how to expand it to the rest of the nation. To get a handle on this problem we sat down with Monika McDermott, a professor of political science and the director of Fordham’s master’s program in elections and campaign management. This spring, McDermott taught the first cohort of students enrolled in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ advanced certificate in public opinion and survey research. Their capstone project was the Fordham Poll, a survey designed to address areas of American life that had been overlooked by most pollsters and was retooled to reflect life during the pandemic. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham news.

How confident are you that the upcoming election will go smoothly?

MM: I would like to say I’m confident, but in reality I don’t think I have a lot of confidence at this point that it’s going to go smoothly.

PV: What worries you most?

MM: Well, we’re in the middle of this perfect storm of everything coming together at once, and obviously the coronavirus is the number one problem that we’re facing. You’ve got the tightness of the presidential race in some states, and added to that you’ve got issues with mailing balloting and the differences in rules and regulations across the state. And you’ve got concerns about the postal service, and you’ve got CIA warnings of Russian influence in the election, and also China and Iran meddling in the election. And then to add to that, you’ve got what’s been happening over the past, since about 2012, you’ve got closing of polling stations in high minority areas that are potentially suppressing the vote for some people. And that’s also coming to a head in this election.

PV: Even before the pandemic, five states actually conducted all their elections primarily by mail. Yet many have raised concerns about the validity of mail-in and absentee ballots, including the president. Is there an actual difference between mail-in voting and absentee voting?

MM: So yeah, there is a technical difference between those two. So the states that do mail-in voting, all-mail voting, those states send out ballots to everyone who is registered to vote automatically. If you’re talking absentee voting that technically is people have to request a ballot from the state and receive it. And they have to supposedly have an excuse, although some states are waving that this year, such as New York, they’re saying COVID is a good enough excuse. And so you have to actually take the active step to request a ballot, whereas in mail-in voting, basically, they’re giving you, they’re sending it out to everybody and that’s Trump’s complaint here.

PV: But I mean, is there a difference in terms of one being more prone to being ripe for fraud?

MM: There’s no evidence of that. Places like Washington and Oregon say that they have no more fraud with their mail-in systems that they had before mailing systems. So, no, there’s actually no quantitative evidence that there is a difference.

PV: Now, last month the House passed a bill that would provide the post office with $25 billion in funds to help it deal with an unexpected increase in mail-in ballots this fall, the Senate opted not to pass it. That same week or roughly around that same time, postmaster general Louis DeJoy told the house oversight committee that the post office “we’ll do everything in our power and structure to deliver the ballots on time”. What do you make of all this? Is this something we should be concerned with at all?

MM: I think, yeah, there are reasons to be concerned. I do. There’s been mostly anecdotal evidence of slowdown of the mail service and given how much they’re going to need to be on the ball for this election, given the increase in mail balloting it’s concerning, it should concern everyone. Like I said, there’s anecdotal evidence that there could be problems just handling the regular mail delivery right now. And so when you think about the impact that all of these absentee ballots or mail-in ballots are going to have on the US postal service, it really is a little bit frightening.

PV:  The thing that I’ve heard that could be problematic is where you have ballots that are cast in person, that are counted earlier. And then you have the mail-in ballots, which will be counted later. And so you run the risk that one candidate basically declares victory before all the ballots have been fully counted and then questions the validity of the mail-ins.

MM: That’s why there’s going to be conflict after this election, no doubt, because unless you do have a strong winner on election night, which there’s no reason to believe there will be one, unless you do have that, you’re going to have court cases and accusations of fraud and mistrust on both sides. And questions about the legitimacy of the next president. It’s really going to be a trial for our democratic system and how people, how much confidence people have in our government and how much confidence people have in our voting system. And that’s what we’re waiting to see is how it all plays out.

PV: A lot of the talk when it comes to these ballots is focused on the delivery, right? That some of them might not make it in time and there’s different levels of like, okay, it gets counted if it’s postmarked by a day, versus it gets a rise by a certain date. So there’s been a lot of focus on that. Are there any other things that you can think of that people should know about when it comes to these absentee ballots that might be areas of concern?

MM: Well, the problem with the system of absentee balloting in the United States is that every state has its own rules. And so the thing voters have to worry about is informing themselves of the rules of their state and abiding by those rules. And that means acting in time, allowing plenty of time for the whole process to happen for you to get your ballot and return it and then have it received by the government and then have it counted. So really it’s just a question of informing yourself about what the rules are. And we know from a lot of political science research that’s been done in the past, American voters aren’t good at informing themselves on rules. That’s not what they do. They’re used to habits, habituated behavior. And if we change it up on them, they’re going to be ballots that are returned after the date, they’re going to be postmarked late. And then they’re going to be questions about whether they’re valid and yeah, it’s going to look like Florida 2000 all over, but with a mail-in system, rather than with the hanging CHADS that we saw at that point in time.

PV: Yeah. I mean, I think I heard that as a percentage-wise, absentee ballots are rejected by a larger margin than votes cast in person. That’s just a fact because people just don’t do things right.

MM: And it’s not just the voters, it’s also the states. Sometimes the states, the post office actually, gets ballots that don’t have the scan codes that they need to have on them for them to process them appropriately. And so that’s a problem that a state might have. They might have envelopes, return envelopes that weren’t printed correctly. Or we actually had friends of ours who voted in the Democratic primary this year and they voted absentee and their envelope, their return envelope was too small for their ballot. So they actually had to call up the government and get another ballot or another return envelope sent to them. And so luckily they were doing this all in time and as far as they know their vote counted, but it was last moment and very frustrating for them.

PV: Do you think the accuracy of polls is affected in any way by the fact that so many people will be voting by mail?

MM: Well, it doesn’t really affect the day-to-day polling that pollsters do because they’re still running likely voter models and trying to estimate who’s likely to vote, which they’re taking into account absentee voting and mail-in voting. So they’re working with new models for that. So that is a little bit tricky, but they’ve been doing this for years and they’re very smart people and they know what they’re doing. I think the main problem, although this is being accounted for as well, are the exit polls that we’re used to getting on election day themselves, which are polls that come as people leave their polling places. Those are going to have to switch over to a lot of telephone polling of mail voters before the election. Now, they’ve already been doing this for years with places like Oregon and Washington, because they’ve had to, so they’re incorporating that into what they’re doing this year, but there could be some glitches there. That’s going to be interesting to watch.

PV: Wow. So this is really going to be unpredictable on November 3rd. It sounds like?

MM: Oh yeah. There’s very little chance that we’ll know any winner on November 3rd.

PV: Best case scenario, what do you think it’ll be announced? We’ll actually have a clear winner?

MM: Best case scenario, I would say within a few days of the election or inside a week, but that’s being a little bit optimistic. I think. So, I just think that a lot of states that aren’t used to dealing with the number of absentee ballots that they’re going to get, are going to have trouble counting them in time and that’s going to be what delays things. And it’s fine, it should be delayed. I mean, we want these votes counted and we want them counted accurately. The problem is going to be that, as you said, if there’s a red wave or even a blue wave and someone decides to claim victory before all the votes are actually counted, then that’s going to call into question the legitimacy of the election. And that’s going to be a major problem for us. But if we can just sit tight and wait for the election results to come in and wait for all the votes to be counted, then I think we’ll be okay.

PV: Has there been any polling done on what people’s expectations are for when the results will be revealed?

MM: I haven’t seen any polling on that. There’s some really interesting polling on how people are going to vote and how they feel about going to an all-mail system and things like that. And they’re very supportive of letting people vote by mail if they want to. But most people themselves say they’re going to vote in person.

PV: Really? In general, still?

MM: Yep. Either early voting. Yes. Those were August numbers I think I saw. Yeah. So they either vote early in person in states that allow it or in-person on election day.

PV: Well, what is the percentage of people in the United States who are actually planning to vote in person or in early voting?

MM: So according to the most recent numbers, I saw 48% of people plan on voting on election day and another 13% plan on voting in-person early voting.

PV: What do the polls tell us about American’s confidence in mail-in voting?

MM: As a general rule, people are skeptical. Almost half of people say that they think there’s going to be some kind of fraud involved in absentee voting. So it’s pretty split and of course, there’s a huge partisan split here, but slightly more believe that there will be fraud than believe that there will be very minimal or no fraud at all. The interesting thing though, is that you actually have, when you ask people, if they’re confident, if they vote by mail that their own vote will count, they say that they’re confident in that. So they’re confident that their own vote is fine, but they’re also convinced by the messaging that they’re getting from above that there will be some fraud involved if there are large numbers of absentee votes.

PV: That’s so interesting. So they believe their own votes will be counted correctly if they mail them in, but they believe everybody else who’s mailing in their votes are highly at risk for fraud?

MM: Yeah. This phenomenon we see with all kinds of things in the political science research. It’s an, I’m okay, but my neighbor’s not kind of thing. And what I think is happening is that people in red states are confident their vote will be counted because they’re confident that their government is doing a good job. But they believe there’s fraud overall, they just believe that fraud is going to happen in the blue states. And so they’re setting themselves up for a situation in which they can say all of Biden’s votes that came in after the fact, after November 3rd, those are fraudulent because there was fraud in those states because there’s a very big partisan split there. And I would imagine that’s what’s going on, is that people are thinking that their own absentee voting will be counted well in their state, but they don’t trust other states.

PV: What should people do to make sure their votes count?

MM: If you’re voting by mail or absentee, a lot of states that you can actually online track the status of your absentee ballot. So if you send it in, you can track it there online and make sure that it goes in and gets counted. So I would say, definitely do that, track your ballot, make sure it goes in. And if it doesn’t seem to have gone in by election day, then go in, if you feel like it and cast a provisional ballot at your polling place. Other than that, the only sure way to make sure your vote is candid is to actually vote in person. I hate to say that because I know there are people who are susceptible to the virus and who have underlying health symptoms and things like that, but that is the one certain way to make sure your vote counts.

PV: One thing that came up was this idea of casting a absentee ballot, and then going into the polling place and also casting a ballot. That was something that Trump had suggested in, I believe it was North Carolina and everybody said, “Oh, you’re suggesting that they all break the law.” But then I heard from a friend, a colleague, that you can do that kind of thing in New York State that that’s not considered breaking the law. What do voters need to know about casting a second ballot in person if they’ve already sent one in by mail?

MM: My understanding is that at least in New York and I don’t know about all the other states, my understanding is that if you have reason to believe your absentee ballot didn’t make it in on time, that you have a right to cast an in-person provisional ballot that will only be counted if your absentee ballot wasn’t counted. And so if they find two ballots for you, they will throw out the provisional ballot and they will count your absentee vote. But you can’t actually vote twice. Now, in all mail voting states, obviously you can’t do that. Those are completely reliant, but I would worry much less about votes not being counted in those states because there are systems that are set up and ready to deal with the influx of mail that they get. I’m just afraid that other states aren’t ready for it.

PV: It seems like that early voting is going to be a much more important factor in the election this time around, because you can be sure your vote will count because you’re going in person. But you can also minimize the risk of being exposed to the virus by going when there won’t be nearly as many people around, that seems like that’s the sweet spot right now.

MM: Absolutely. And yet you’ve only got 13% saying that they’re going to do early voting. So people seem to like the tradition of election day. And that’s the only thing I can think of is that they want to go in and vote on November 3rd and that’s the way they’ve done it and that’s the way they’re going to continue to do it. So yeah, we’ll see what the numbers actually show and how many people do vote early. But at this point, it’s a pretty small proportion.

PV: Is there anything that gives you hope when it comes to the election?

MM: Yes, I have hope in the American, I have faith in the American people. I believe that despite the coronavirus, despite all the problems we’ve seen this year and the disasters that have befallen on us from coast to coast, I believe that people will turn out to vote. I believe they care about who wins the election and I believe that they will make it happen in whatever way, shape or form they have to. If they have to stand in line forever, I think they’ll stand in line. If they have to do absentee voting, they’ll do it. I think I have faith that Americans will stand up for their democracy.

PV: For more information about your state’s rules on voting, including provisional votes in New York State visit fordham.edu/vote2020.