Gadarian Discusses the Presidential Debate and Election With Al Jazeera and USA Today
September 18, 2024
Al Jazeera,USA Today
The first presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump took place last week. Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking and associate dean for research, discussed the optics and strategy with Al Jazeera.
“One of the things I think the split screen was able to do was to show Harris looking really composed. She was looking right at Trump and she wasn't going to let up,” says Gadarian. “And I think part of the strategy wasn't really about him at all. It was about ‘I can hold the stage. I can be presidential. I can be commander in chief.’”
In the USA Today article, “'A long relay race': Hillary Clinton on passing the torch to Kamala Harris - Interview,” Gadarian says, “A lot of it is about Clinton normalizing that women run for national office. We got to skip all that conversation of, like, are we ready for a woman candidate?”
Gadarian discusses anxiety in politics in the USA Today article, “The Anxious States of America: We searched for Hope. Here's what we found.”
“Events in the world matter in that they kind of prime people to be anxious about certain things," Gadarian says.
“But politicians come in and through their ads and through talking to people and their speeches, they really hammer on particular issues,” she says, “because they believe, or they have a sense from polling data, that it benefits their party for people to be anxious about those things.”
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