At 1:45 p.m. on July 21, history and public affairs professor Julian Zelizer sat at his desk in his home office, working on his latest books and enjoying a hot Sunday summer afternoon. At 1:46 p.m., President Joe Biden shocked the nation with his Instagram announcement that he would be withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. Before Zelizer could even finish reading Biden’s letter, he was inundated with phone calls from news outlets and radio shows seeking his expert analysis of the situation. With no time to prepare notes, he powered up his computer and addressed the nation live on CNN.
“As soon as President Biden sent out that Instagram social media letter, I just started to get calls,” Zelizer said. “When I do CNN and radio shows, there is no prep time … I don’t have notes, I just flip on the computer, there I am, close it up and go back to my work.”
In the same way Zelizer is used to jumping on national television at the drop of a hat, he can churn out an op-ed within a lunch break.
By 6:11 p.m. that same evening, Zelizer had published a piece in Foreign Policy, analyzing how Biden’s withdrawal from the race could create opportune conditions for a newer, younger, and stronger coalition of Democrats to inspire the electorate and win the race.
“I can do it pretty quickly. I’ve been doing this for so long at this point. My rule is that when I write an op-ed I should be able to draft it within half an hour,” Zelizer explained. “If I can’t, whatever I’m trying to say is just too complicated because this is a medium that kind of privileges clarity.”
Zelizer attributes this efficiency to years of experience. A prolific writer, he has published over 1200 op-eds over the course of his career. Zelizer told The Daily Princetonian that he made his first media appearance on local TV in 1998 during his first job as a professor at SUNY and began writing op-eds after then President Bill Clinton was impeached that same year.
Throughout this close election season, Zelizer and other Princeton professors have been extending their political expertise beyond the classroom, regularly submitting articles for a host of publications.
Another professor using his voice to speak directly to voters is neuroscience professor Sam Wang, the architect of several election tools, like his poll aggregator, the Princeton Election Consortium, which has predicted national elections since 2004, and Vote Maximizer, which calculates per vote power in elections across the country. Additionally, Wang self-publishes pieces on his Substack blog called Fixing Bugs in Democracy.
A regular on Foreign Policy, CNN, and The New York Times, Zelizer has had a busy election season analyzing critical moments and themes in the congressional and presidential elections this year through a historical lens. From using VP Hubert Humphrey as a historical foil to Vice President Kamala Harris in the discussion of her entry into the presidential race, to examining the country’s history of political violence in light of Trump’s assassination attempt, Zelizer looks backward for perspective about the present.
“My value added is not telling you kind of what’s happening minute to minute. I don’t tend to be the guy saying it’s unprecedented,” Zelizer said. “I just try to give some perspective to people of when things are changing, when things are new, how they’re new, or how they are part of something we’ve seen before.”
Zelizer said the main goal of his work as both a history and public affairs professor is to reach young people willing to learn. At the same time, his work requires him to engage with different types of audiences.
“I love reaching young people, and that’s the basis of my work, but the audiences are much broader, and it depends where I am. If I’m writing something for CNN, that’s a broader audience…The Atlantic or Foreign Policy tends to be a magazine reading crowd,” Zelizer said.
Taking an economic perspective to Zelizer’s historical outlook, economics and public affairs professor Alan Blinder’s Wall Street Journal columns address a fundamental misunderstanding of the performance of the economy among many voters, which has contributed to the increased importance and polarization of the issue on the presidential ballot.
“In the last two, three years, I think there has been a huge consensus that [the economy] has performed well, even though public opinion doesn’t feel that way,” Blinder noted of his fellow economists.
“And if you look at the trajectory since then, almost everything, almost everything, has gotten much, much better,” he continued. “Now, the one thing that hasn’t, which is weighing on voters’ minds, apparently — we know this from public opinion polling — is inflation. We had a burst of inflation. Now, inflation rates are down in the two to three percent range, but people still remember what the price of eggs used to be three years ago.”
Blinder sees his pieces as a way to bridge this information gap among voters, with pieces like “The Economy Is Good. Why Don’t People Know It?” and “Harris Easily Beats Trump on Economic Policy.” In one of his pieces, Blinder explains that the electorate mistakenly reminisces on a past economy with better prices without understanding that we cannot return to those price levels without a “truly sick economy.”
“We can’t send the electorate back to take Economics 101 that they didn’t take when they were 18 years old. That’s not possible,” Blinder said. “So I take it as part of my responsibility for my Wall Street Journal readership to toot that horn as much as I can.”
Zelizer and Wang also aim to close the information gap between academia and the general public.
“There’s a huge gap often between universities and the public, and I think part of what professors who do this kind of stuff can do is show interesting connections,” Zelizer said. “Look, political scientists have been writing about polarization ... I love to make those bridges when I can.”
While Blinder and Zelizer are regular columnists for major news publications, Wang prefers to self-publish pieces about the election on “Fixing Bugs in Democracy” as a “direct conduit” to voters.
“Everything on the Substack is freely available because my emphasis is readership,” Wang added.
Along with publishing reflections with catchy titles, often making puns out of famous movie and book titles, like “Ten Things I Hate About U[.S.redistricting]” and “A Carnation-shaped gerrymander grows in Georgia,” Wang also uses his Substack to regularly update viewers on developments in the Princeton Election Consortium, his poll aggregator currently tracking the congressional and presidential elections.
Because Wang’s projects largely deal in statistics and math, he chooses Substack as the medium to provide instantaneous access to the public.
“Major journalism outlets tend not to really deal in math. It’s a somewhat specialized boutique subject,” Wang explained. “The New Yorker doesn’t do any equations. Self-publishing lends itself well to having something to say and not having to worry about an editor who doesn’t know what the t-distribution is.”
Via his Substack and his myriad election reform tools and research projects, Wang is in the business of “mak[ing] the government more responsive to the people” by engaging with redistricting, gerrymandering, and voting procedure reform.
Wang recently gave a TED Talk titled, “Can math help repair democracy?”and has even served as an expert witness in a federal lawsuit about ballot design, directly contributing to the federal change of ballot rules ordering the use of a conventional ballot. Arising out of the 2024 Democratic primary election for Senate and Representative in New Jersey, Wang was approached by Rep. Andy Kim’s campaign for U.S. Senate who asked him to analyze the impact of the county line, a ballot design that groups candidates by party endorsement rather than office.
Using his neuroscience and data background, he conducted statistical analyses on the cognitive impact of the ballot design.
“I know as a neuroscientist that the eye is drawn towards rows of objects,” Wang said. “This geometric design gives some candidates a 17 point advantage on average just by where they are placed on the ballot.”
The judge in the case ultimately ordered the use of conventional ballot designs in New Jersey, as is standard in the other 49 states.
“New Jersey ballots are much simpler now, so that is a big improvement,” Wang said of the outcome.
With election day fast approaching on Tuesday, Zelizer, Blinder, and Wang’s contributions to the election these past few months will reach a critical point.
“In the end, my ideals are young people who are kind of learning and starting to get interested,” Zelizer said. “If this can get them just a little bit more interested, or think about it in a different way, just as I do in the classroom, it feels very rewarding.”
Valentina Moreno is an assistant Features editor for the ‘Prince.’
Please direct any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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