Ahead of the presidential election on Nov. 5, WashU launched a new political science course for the fall 2024 semester, “Topics in Politics: The 2024 Presidential Campaign,” focusing on the 2024 United States presidential election.

While the course fulfills credits for the American politics subfield for a political science major, the course is open to students of various majors and is one of multiple classes students at WashU can take about the election. 

Junior Elena Wierich, a political science major, said she enjoys the class because it is so connected to current events. 

“I’ve never had a class where the learning is so topical and on time,” Wierich said. “What the professor frequently does is release, the morning before class, some quick reading, like two New York Times articles, and it’s very cool because sometimes they’ll print like the day or week before and have to do with whatever module we’re talking about.” 

She added that she was surprised by how many students are not affiliated with the political science department. 

“[Students in the class are] just really excited about the election and interested in learning about campaigns and what this election is going to be. It’s cool that there are people who are just interested in the topic and really contributing to the discussion,” Wierich said. 

The course, taught by Professor Dino Christenson is designed to help students apply political science approaches and concepts to the 2024 election. The class is largely discussion-based, hence its small class size of 32 students. 

“I recall there being 20 to 30 students on the waitlist with 20 students enrolled. This fall, with all the excitement and anxiety around the 2024 election, I did something I don’t usually do: I decided to let in everyone on the waitlist if one, they attended the first week of class, and two, they were willing to work hard and were confident they could meet the demands of the syllabus. About half the waitlisted students took me up on my offer,” Christenson said.

Sophomore Bralin Duckett felt like students in the class followed through on the expectations for discussion. 

“It’s really expected that the students are engaging with the readings and being vocal about that. So he made that very clear at the beginning,” Duckett said.

As a 300-level course, most students have taken a number of political science courses. All have a solid foundation in civics, though the depth of knowledge varies across subjects.  

Junior and psychology major, Lila Promisel, said that she appreciated the discussion-based nature of the class.

 “He occasionally will lecture for a few minutes, but the bulk of the class is talking to one another. He has the students orchestrate who speaks, and he has discussion leaders for each lesson — people who did a paper and thought of discussion questions to bring to the class. It’s really just an open and welcoming environment,” Promisel said.

Along with class participation, critical readings, writing, and group projects are designed to analyze the 2024 election. 

“The [readings] all just provide takes on past elections and the implications of those elections, and we are asked to analyze what that means for this election,” Promisel said. 

Wierich said that she was expecting a lot of textbook reading about past campaigns, but that students have been able to do their own research. One example of research covered swing states, Promisel added.  

“We just did a presentation for it called ad wars, where we created campaign ads for a swing state, for one of the two candidates, and did a counter ad, not actually forming an ad, but showing the opposition research,” she said. 

This concept of comparing research across parties is consistent with objectives in The Business of Election course. Professor Steven Malter co-teaches this class with Professor Andrew Reeves during the presidential election years beginning in 2020.

“Their big assignment is to pick an issue and look at it from both candidates’ perspectives, the perspective of other stakeholders, and then predict how it’s going to play out in the thinking of the electorate,” Malter said. “So they have to turn in the paper before election day, and then they’ll have to do kind of an addendum, looking at all the data to see, was the hypothesis right? What wasn’t? What changed?”

Malter described the timeliness of the Business of Elections class with presidential elections as a live case study.

“It’s just very real-time assignments. You know, it’s not, read an article and write it up. It’s like,  let’s actually look at this live data. It’s a live case study, which is really exciting,” Malter said. 

Duckett touched on the immersive aspect of Christenson’s course. 

“We have a group assignment coming up where we will actually go out and do exit polling. So, that’s part of the immersive experience. We’re going to go to a bunch of different polling places and ask people how they voted, then take that data back to class and present on it.”

Promisel noted that there are no exams in the Christenson course. 

“It just makes the classes so interesting and enjoyable because you’re just there to talk about these things and learn, as opposed to feeling as though you have to memorize a shtick. There’s no right or wrong, [so] if you were to take an exam, what would be correct and what would be incorrect?”

Likewise, Duckett said that the class tries to abstain from black-and-white thinking 

“A lot of people will say that the Republican Party owns an issue like the economy, and we can kind of look at polls to kind of prove that point, but it was actually a pretty good discussion in class,” Duckett said. “A lot of students brought up how that isn’t true for a lot of Americans.” 

Duckett said that his assumptions about specific voter issues were challenged by the discourse from class. 

“That whole conversation about which party owns which issue was really eye-opening for me, because I kind of did associate certain issues with certain parties,” he said. “But now I’ve learned that it may be beneficial not to assume that all the time.”

Editors Note: This article was updated on Dec. 13 to more accurately reflect aspects of Christenson’s class.