Heather Gautney, Ph.D., felt the “Bern.” And now she wants to share what she learned from it.

In her just-published book, Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement (Verso, 2018), Gautney, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham, detailed what it was like to work with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as he campaigned for the 2016 Democratic party presidential nomination. Gautney had previously worked for Sanders when she was an American Sociological Association Fellow during the 2012-2013 academic year and joined his campaign in 2015 as a researcher.

She described the book as half policy analysis, half op-ed, with a particular emphasis on the lessons the Democratic Party should take from Sanders’ surprisingly strong showing in the primaries and the triumph of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Although Sanders ultimately lost the nomination to Clinton, Gautney said his candidacy exposed what she called the contradictions of the Democratic Party’s platform for the last four decades.

Shifting Attitudes Among Voters

“What his campaign did was expose that at least half of the Democratic Party are really people who identify as progressives or support a progressive agenda, and since he ran, I think we’ve been seeing a real shift toward supporting that agenda,” she said.

As evidence, she pointed to proposals to expand Medicare to all U.S. citizens. Sanders has been promoting the idea for years with little success, but this past year, the plan had 16 co-signers, including Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

To some extent, Gautney said she feels that the fact that Trump won is evidence that the party should reconsider issues that Sanders and Democratic leaders butted heads on, such as trade, free education, and universal healthcare.

A “neoliberal agenda that promotes growth, prosperity for all, the wonders of globalization and consumerism and the high-tech future” has left many people behind and cost Democrats voters in places like Wisconsin, she said.

“There’s been lots of glossy language about the wonders of free trade, and yet this was a huge issue in 2016 for people [who opposed it]in Midwestern states,” she said.

A Revival for Ideas Past

Gautney said she was as surprised as anyone else that Sanders got as far as he did and viewed his popularity with millennials as proof that the time is right to promote his agenda. This would have been true even in the event of a Clinton victory, which Gautney assumed would be the case when she started writing the book. To those who say the notion that free education is a radical idea, she noted that City College of New York, her alma mater, was once tuition-free.

“These are things that in some way or form have existed, so Bernie’s goal has been to say that. We are the wealthiest country on earth, we can achieve these things, and we can take care of our people,” she said.

“We can rebuild the middle class in this country. It’ll be like the middle class that existed in the 1950’s, except this time it’ll be a more diverse middle class, and women and people of color will be included.”

Gautney devoted a chapter to the schisms between the Sanders and Clinton camps that were never fully healed. In another, she elucidates the difference between social movements and elections. She also delved into the outreach efforts that Sanders embarked on after the November election to help him get a better handle on why former Barack Obama voters in battleground states then voted for Trump.

It was sobering, she said, because so many of the promises that Sanders had campaigned on—like more money for social security and stronger support of Medicare and Medicaid—were ones Trump embraced as well, and these voters chose to support Trump. She contends that class has a lot to do with it.

“Over the last three or four decades, a class perspective has increasingly been taken off the table, and one of the things that this 2016 election did was put it firmly back on. I argue that class is really a fundamental organizing principle of this election season, on both the right and left,” she said.

The takeaway of the book should be of interest to partisans on both sides of the aisle, she said.

“I think it’ll be interesting as a sort of historical accounting for this kind of moment, and one that reaches back into the 1970s and then reaches forward to 2020 and maybe even beyond.”

Gautney will discuss her book with Adolph Reed Jr. and Cornel West on May 16 at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. For more details, visit the event website.

Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold warned that, if campaign finance laws are not fixed to address the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the concerns of average citizens will be ignored by both major political parties.

Feingold spoke at an April 24 appearance at Fordham.

“When both parties have been bought off, you get things like trade agreements that send all our jobs overseas on votes like 90 to 10. You get a vote such as the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which consolidated things like the radio industry and took away an enormous amount of creativity,” he told a packed house in McNally Amphitheatre at the Fordham School of Law.

“You know what else you get? You get the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and you get a crash in this nation’s economy, on a vote of 92 to 8. And yes, I was on the losing side of all these votes.”

Feingold was at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus for a panel on “The Influence of Money on Political Agendas,” which he shared with Michael Malbin, Ph.D., professor of political science at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D.,associate professor of political science and director of Fordham’s Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy.

The panel was part of “Money, Media and the Battle for Democracy’s Soul,” an interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the Fordham Center for Ethics Education and the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy.

NBC News political director and chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd delivered the keynote address, “Media Coverage and Election 2012: Navigating the Political Landscape.”

Feingold and Malbin both emphasized that there are concrete ways to reform campaign finance laws, even in the aftermath of the 2010 decision in Citizens United, which, in allowing for unrestricted campaign contributions by corporations and unions, has unleashed a flood of unregulated money into the political arena.

Malbin lauded Feingold for his efforts, along with Arizona Senator John McCain, to regulate “soft money” via the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, but said efforts like it were akin to sitting on the lid of a pot about to boil over.

Instead, he advocated expansion of campaign finance practices currently in use in New York City, which allows a 6-to-1 matching system for gifts of $175 or under. The system encourages a greater pool of citizens to run for office, he said, and—just as importantly—encourages more people to give to campaigns.

“This is not only important financially, but it’s also important in terms of what’s the moral content of democracy,” he said, noting that New York could act as a model for the nation. “It’s having people more fully engage in the process that they should in fact own.”

Both were withering in their assessments of Citizens United. Where it is particularly insidious is it does not require independent “SuperPACs” to disclose where they get the unlimited funds they are free to spend on political campaigns, they said.

“[In 2002], every time we brought up McCain–Feingold, they said ‘We don’t need this McCain–Feingold stuff; we just need disclosure.’ Until Citizens United; then it was ‘Oh now we don’t need disclosure,’” Feingold said.

“A group can shunt the money from a corporation to a SuperPAC, it could be from Exxon, and they could call it ‘Main Street Barbers for Main Street.’”

Feingold, who has founded Progressives United to fight Citizens United, said he suspected that foreign money was now also being used in SuperPACs.

Malbin joked that the fig leaf that supposedly separated political campaigns from independent groups is now made of “chiffon.”

“If you don’t think sitting presidents are going to send cabinet members around to ask people to give money to their independent campaigns, one, you haven’t read about Watergate, two, you haven’t read about Bill Clinton, and three, you haven’t read what this White House has said it is going to do,” he said.

“Now, this particular White House may not behave corruptly, but it is absolutely guaranteed that sooner or later, somebody will.”

But given the historic volatility of the final weeks of a presidential campaign, and with the issue of race a still wild card, the associate professor of political science is not going to hedge her bets.

McDermott, an expert in political psychology and voter behavior, moonlights as a CBS election consultant who interprets exit polls. After crunching the numbers on Election Night, McDermott’s analysis of who voted for whom, and why, will assist news anchors in explaining why Obama or McCain won or lost a state or region. Election 2008 marks McDermott’s fourth presidential election behind the scenes.

Following the 2000 election in which critical Florida exit polls predicted a win for Democratic candidate Al Gore, McDermott admits she is somewhat “gun shy” about being an exit poll enthusiast. Nevertheless, she sees them as “the most reliable science” for predicting voter behavior.

“Exit polls are one of the few times where you know you are actually talking to people who have voted,” she said. “[Exit voters] are also more likely to be enthusiastic and give honest answers, more honest than someone you just interrupted during dinnertime with a phone call.

“Although [pre-election] polls suggest a win for Obama, I still believe we are in uncharted waters,” McDermott said. “This race has more dynamics than any other at the presidential level, and so many unknowns.”

McDermott has researched the behavior of many voter cohorts, including the Catholic voting bloc. She recently published  “Voting for Catholic Candidates: The Evolution of a Stereotype,” in Social Science Quarterly. According to McDermott, Catholics no longer form a monolithic voting bloc as they did during the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, the nation’s only Catholic president.

In fact, voting among Catholics has tended, in the last two decades, toward Republicanism, she said, largely based on social issues and on the Reagan revolution. (In 1980 many moderate Democrats switched parties to support the 40th president.)

“Catholics tend to be treated as a swing voting bloc by the media, but they’re really a bellwether group,” McDermott said.“They are just as diverse as the rest of America, so sort of as Catholics go, so goes the rest of the nation, or vice versa.”

The key swing blocs in this election, McDermott said, are independents and new voters. A recent nationwide poll showed that voters in the 18-to-29 age bracket support Obama over McCain by a margin of 61 percent to 30 percent. For an Obama camp, this is the upside.

The downside?

“They flake out, and don’t vote,” McDermott said. “According to current polls, if [young people]don’t turn out, then McCain has close to an even shot.”

Recent negative, tactical campaigning in target Republican and independent markets has put off many pundits, but McDermott said such campaigning is historically effective. The Republican Party, McDermott said, has revolutionized the science of voter targeting in the last two decades. Republican campaign strategist Karl Rove, former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush (and now a political analyst) has helped to hone the art of micro-targeting.

In micro targeting, political strategists look at consumer databases and measure how consumer behavior affects voting behavior. For example: Are the owners of Jaguars in a certain suburb more likely to be motivated by a positive or negative ad?

Of course, both parties practice micro targeting. But the Republicans, McDermott said, have perfected it.

“Micro-targeting is genius; it’s absolutely a science,” she said. “[They can] target tiny regions based on data that companies have about every American, know what that person’s concerns probably are, and put the right [political]advertisement in that market.”

Since this year’s election could result in the nation’s first African-American president, the question of racism among voters, is an unprecedented, yet hard-to-measure aspect of voter behavior. A phenomenon known as the Bradley/Wilder effect refers to a discrepancy between voter opinion polls and the election outcome when a white candidate and an African-American candidate run against one another.

In 1982, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African American, narrowly lost his bid for governor of California even though he was several points ahead in the polls. Similar polling discrepancies, sometimes in double digits, showed up in the 1989 elections of L. Douglas Wilder, former governor of Virginia, and David Dinkins, former mayor of New York City.

“There is evidence that the [Bradley] effect is diminishing,” McDermott said, “but there is no doubt that it has potential right now. There are a lot of people out there for whom race is a serious issue, and when they go into the voting booths, who knows?”

With the nation’s demographics in shift, the emphasis on large swing states as the key to victory is changing, McDermott said. On Nov. 4, she will be watching the red states of Virginia and Florida as well as New Hampshire, as potential game changers. If Obama takes any or all of these states, she said, it could mean an “early evening.”
If not, McDermott points to the Mountain West states of Colorado, Nevada and Montana as ones that might buck a Republican tradition.

“They’re peripheral states you don’t think of,” she said, “but if you put enough of them together, you get an electoral college victory.”

“All the President’s Faculty: Shadow Cabinet and Political Briefing,” took place on Tuesday, Oct. 28 in the Lowenstein Center’s 12th Floor Lounge on the Lincoln Center campus. The event featured Fordham faculty with expertise in politics, communications, urban affairs and business.

Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and the director of the Center for Electoral Politics and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management opened the evening with “What People Want,” a breakdown of polling trends.

Panagopoulos said that while issues such as gun control and abortion rights have changed little over the years, December 2007 marked the tipping point when voters’ concerns about the war in Iraq were eclipsed by their worries about the economy and taxes.

The “shadow cabinet” featured John P. Entelis, Ph.D., professor of political science and director of the Middle East studies program; Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African-American studies and history and director of the urban studies program; Falguni Sen, Ph.D., professor of management systems; Tom DeLuca, Ph.D., professor of political science and director of the international studies program; and Beth Knobel, Ph.D., Emmy Award-winning former Moscow bureau chief for CBS News and assistant professor of communication and media studies.

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the major themes in an election that could create some historic firsts—namely, the first black president or the first woman vice president—was sameness.

Entelis noted that polls show most people in the Middle East expect the United States’ behavior in that region to change little no matter who is elected.

Sen, taking the position of a lobbyist, said that as a general rule, the business community isn’t particularly concerned with who is elected.

Sen did say that winner should have a transition team ready as soon as possible, because the current economic crisis requires immediate attention. He supported Naison’s touting of a 21st century New Deal to rebuild the county’s bridges, highways and schools and create jobs for developers who are being stymied by dried-up bank loans.

“We are living in a globalized world, and the New Deal has to be reformulated within this globalized, 21st century world,” he said. “We may need new things that have similar impact, but are not necessarily the same policies.”

DeLuca decided to talk about how, as president, he would reform the democratic process to make it more inclusive. Noting that he was once able to vote in Wisconsin on the day of an election with nothing more than a gas bill, he suggested that voter registration be universal.

It is time, he said, to transfer control of voting-rights laws from states—where they reside and are wildly inconsistent—to the federal government.

“There is actually no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “When I learned that, it was a shock to me, but it’s actually a fact.”

DeLuca also called for large-scale changes, such as abolishing the Electoral College, as a way for third parties to gain power, as well as small ones, such as holding Election Day during a weekend.

“Try to imagine this: you’re an advisor for say, President McBama, and your job is to go to Afghanistan or Iraq and train people for elections,” he said.

“So the first thing you do is you get off the plane and you meet your counterpart and you say, ‘I’ve got a great idea. You want to know about voting? Here’s what you’ve got to do: Go to the middle of your work week, and hold Election Day on that day.’ Could you imagine anybody giving that kind of advice?”

Knobel, who lived in Russia for 14 years, explained how, from afar, the United States seems so divided, it appears to be two different countries inhabiting the same space. For anything to be accomplished, she said, communication between conservatives and liberals must improve.

“Moving heaven and earth” to convince former secretary of state Colin Powell to join a future administration would be one of her first bits of advice to either candidate. She also noted that whichever candidate wins will really need to show the American public how he is working hard to solve the myriad problems facing the country.

“The president needs to give frequent press conferences,” she said. “If the stats I’ve seen are correct, George W. Bush this year has only given four solo press conferences.”

The “November 4th Election Series” is an ongoing program that gathers political junkies of all stripes to watch the debates and election returns in O’Keefe Commons on the Rose Hill campus.

“We feel that it’s important to engage students, faculty and staff at this important time in the nation’s history,” said Jennifer M. Mussi, Ph.D., assistant dean of the Office of Student Leadership and Community Development.

More than 110 people watched the first verbal sparring match between candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, Mussi said. Many attendees stuck around afterward to engage in spirited conversation about the issues. Attendance is expected to increase as Election Day approaches, she added.

The series began in 2004, when Mussi and Christopher Rogers, dean of students at Rose Hill, were stationed at the Lincoln Center campus. Rodgers said that the debates are well attended because this presidential election is attracting the attention of young voters in a way that other recent elections have not.

“Young people are very interested in this election, especially young people at Fordham,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of Obama t-shirts and McCain signs around campus. Our students want to talk about [the election], and it’s good for the University to have this neutral space where ideas can be exchanged informally.”

Of course, the large projection television and American-style refreshments (think hot apple cobbler and apple pie, among other snacks) probably don’t hurt the turnout either.

The remaining schedule is as follows:

Thursday, Oct. 2
vice presidential debate

Tuesday, Oct. 7
second presidential debate

Wednesday, Oct. 15
third presidential debate

Tuesday, Nov. 4
election returns

The “November 4th Election Series” is sponsored by the Dean of Students at Rose Hill, Residential Life, Office of Student Leadership and Community Development, the Alcohol and Other Drug Education Program, USG, RHA, CSA, College Democrats, Young Republicans, Community Service, Peer Educators, American Age, and The Ram.

That’s the premise behind an upcoming event in which five University professors will temporarily slip on the mantle of adviser to the nation’s chief of state.

“All the President’s Faculty: Shadow Cabinet and Political Briefing” will be held at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 28, in the Lowenstein Center’s 12th-Floor Lounge on the Lincoln Center campus.

The participants, all experts in political science, journalism, history or management, will sound off on the strategies, subtleties and skullduggery necessary to run the White House in 2009.

The shadow cabinet is as follows:

• Tom DeLuca, Ph.D., professor of political science and director of the International Studies Program

• John P. Entelis, Ph.D., professor of political science and director of the Middle East Studies Program

• Beth Knobel, Ph.D., Emmy Award-winning former Moscow bureau chief for CBS
News and professor of communication and media studies

• Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African-American studies and history and director of the Urban Studies Program

• Falguni Sen, Ph.D., professor of management systems

Also that evening, a leading voice on presidential politics will reveal what the public wants out of the next Oval Office occupant. Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D., will present “What the American People Want” in conjunction with the Shadow Cabinet panel discussion.

Panagopoulos is an assistant professor of political science and director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management. A noted commentator on campaigns and elections, voting behavior, public opinion and campaign finance, he was part of the Decision Desk team at NBC News during the 2006 election cycle.

A reception will conclude the event. All are invited to attend.

Kickoff events took place on Sept. 17 at the Lincoln Center campus and on Sept. 24 at the Rose Hill campus. Student volunteers waited at tables in the student centers, providing registration forms and guidance for filling them out. Students from outside New York received help with registering in their home states, and registration forms were available at various sites around campus.

“The University holds voter registration drives as part of its mission to educate the whole person,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “Voting is the most powerful way in which most Americans exercise their voices in national affairs, and this year we are happy to expand our registration efforts to include our neighbors in the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill communities.”

This year Fordham opened its registration drive to the general public for the first time. People from outside the Fordham community were able to register at the Rose Hill campus. University officials also set up voter registration at the Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center, located at the Amsterdam Houses apartment complex near the Fordham Lincoln Center campus.

Fordham conducts voter registration drives every four years, coinciding with presidential elections. This year’s drive was a collaborative effort spearheaded by the Office of the Dean at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Student Affairs, the Community Service Program, United Student Government and the Office of Government Relations.

“I think a voter registration drive sets the stage,” said Lesley A. Massiah, assistant vice president for government relations and state affairs. “A registration drive, if done in cooperation with other University departments—including other staff and faculty—actually provides a wonderful environment for students to begin to think about the political world in which they live. Hopefully, voter registration translates into active participation in the political process. Once engaged, it’s hard for [students]not to stay engaged.”

University officials also recruited students to work at the polls on Election Day, Nov. 4, when the University is closed.

The center was founded by Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of Fordham’s elections and campaign management program. Its launch came in the form of “Citizen-Owned Elections: Public Financing Past, Present and Future,” a daylong conference that was representative of the center’s goal of bringing scholars and practitioners together to tackle tough subjects, Panagopoulos said.

“It’s a manifestation of a long tradition at Fordham of having intellectual debates and exchanges about real-world issues and influencing real-world debates,” he said. “Scholars can learn what is practical and what can be applied, and practitioners can learn what empirical evidence shows.”

When it comes to guest panelists and lecturers, Panagopoulos has drawn from an extensive network of contacts he has made from work on the NBC News Decision Desk in 2006, as well as his experience as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in the office of U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“We’re aiming at a high level of discussion that cannot be distilled and examined in the superficial way that TV programs do,” he said. There’s a place for that, but you can’t discuss financing public elections in less than seven seconds without losing audiences. It takes more to flesh out those ideas.”

Nancy Busch, Ph.D., dean of the Fordham Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said the center represents a continuation of a tradition that former Fordham president Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., started with his leadership of the campaign finance board when it was founded.

“With his retirement, we needed to continue that kind of commitment to New York City, to national politics and, quite frankly, to international politics,” she said. “It’s exciting because open and fair elections are at the heart of a democracy, and that’s what the center is all about.”

Just as the Thursday program brought a raft of high-level experts and elected officials to Fordham, Panagopoulos noted that Pulpit Politics, a conference the center is sponsoring in April with the Center for Ethics Education, will feature Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute. Brazile is one of the Democrats’ “super-delegates,” so her appearance will no doubt attract attention in the midst of the presidential election season. The conference will discuss religion, gender and social justice in the 2008 elections.

“We’ll be inviting high-profile officials and operatives to speak to students, and we’ll be exploiting opportunities to bring people together, and to study aspects of electoral politics,” Panagopoulos said. “This is just the beginning.”

“If California puts this through, the Democrats would be in very deep trouble,” said Beck, the speaker at a Fordham College at 60 lecture, “Election 2008: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” held at the Lincoln Center campus.

The Republican National Committee’s bid to get on the June ballot a measure that would divide California’s electoral vote on a congressional basis rather than the current winner-take-all system would put the GOP on easy street, Beck said.

“The Republicans wouldn’t have to do anything anywhere else,” she said.

Beck also addressed the challenges facing Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., the lone female candidate in the race to the White House.

“If she’s too decisive, she’s considered unfeminine; if she’s caring, she’s considered too soft,” Beck said. “She is a woman trying to play a man’s game and it isn’t clear to me that she can overcome that.”

Beck, whose area of concentration is American Politics, is a deputy editor of the Western Social Science Journal. Currently, she writes on Eleanor Roosevelt and her role in framing the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

DeGregorio spoke at a seminar entitled “Making Sure Every Vote Was Counted: Evaluating Election Administration in the 2006 Elections” on Dec. 4 at the Lincoln Center campus. Fordham University’s Center for Electoral Politics and the Elections and Campaign Management Program sponsored the event.

DeGregorio noted that one-third of the nation’s voters cast ballots on new machines this year–a circumstance that led to both mechanical and to human glitches.  Even so, he said that only 39 out of 6,700 jurisdictions reported problems, and that only one court challenge was filed.

“There is no substitute for training and experience when it comes to elections,” he said. “In 2007, at least 25 percent of our election officials will be brand new.  We have more work to do and more challenges ahead.”

The commission was established by Congress in 2002 as part of HAVA to serve as a national clearinghouse for reviewing federal elections. Under HAVA’s mandates, all states must include alternative language accessibility for non-English-speaking voters, allow for persons whose eligibility is questioned to cast provisional ballots, and require a “manual audit” paper trail for all voting systems.

– Janet Sassi

DeGregorio was a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and served as an assistant to Missouri Attorney General John Ashcroft. Nominated by President George W. Bush, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2003 to serve an initial two-year term on the EAC, and served as the agency’s vice chairman in 2005 before being elected chair. He has focused his efforts on EAC’s mandates to review state election reform plans and establish new voluntary voting system guidelines, develop best practices in election administration, provide guidance and advisories to election officials and conduct studies on election reform issues.

Prior to his appointment with EAC, DeGregorio served as chief operating officer of the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), where he provided technical assistance in election administration in the former Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, and several African and Asian nations. DeGregorio also led a team that supplied technical advice in Florida and Missouri during the November 2002 elections.

From 1985 to 1993, DeGregorio served as director of elections for St. Louis County, Missouri’s largest jurisdiction. During his tenure, he instituted changes in voter registration, training, accessibility, counting, and management procedures. He served as co-chair of the Missouri Election Reform Commission in 2001.