With the recent assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and a growing number of Democrats calling for President Joe Biden to remove himself from the ticket, the 2024 presidential election has brought the nation’s political, cultural and intraparty rifts sharply into focus. UCLA experts are available to speak on these issues and a variety of other election-related topics, from immigration, voting rights and LGBTQ issues to campaign rhetoric and the spread of misinformation.
Safeguarding democracy and election law
Richard Hasen
Richard Hasen is an expert on election law, voting and campaign finance. He isa professor atUCLA School of Law,where he directs theSafeguarding Democracy Project,a cross-disciplinary and bipartisan group of scholars and activists working to ensure that elections in the U.S. remain free and fair.
Email: hasen@law.ucla.edu
Joseph Fishkin
Fishkin is an expert on constitutional law, election law, antidiscrimination law and the interaction of law and the political economy. He is a professor at the UCLA School of Law.
Email: fishkin@law.ucla.edu
Campaign rhetoric
Pamela Hieronymi
Hieronymi is a professor of philosophy who can comment on the nature of truth, ethics and moral responsiblity in relation to Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric. She is the author of “Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals” and has served as a consultant for depictions of philosophy on television.
Email: hieronym@humnet.ucla.edu
Norma Mendoza-Denton
Mendoza-Denton is a professor in the department of anthropology. Her 2020 book, “Language in the Trump Era,” analyzes Trump’s unprecedented rhetorical style and how it has sown conflict even as it has powered his meteoric rise. She can comment on campaign rhetoric for both candidates. Her research focuses on youth, language, migration, politics and identity.
Email:n.mendozadenton@gmail.com
The spread of misinformation
Safiya Noble
Noble is a scholar in internet and information studies, African American studies and gender studies. She co-founded the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, or C2i2, and is director of the UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice.She is co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Her book “Algorithms of Oppression” was one of the first to identify the deep and damaging gender and racial biases in online searches and artificial intelligence.
Noble can comment on the spread of misinformation online, search engine bias, social media algorithms and deepfakes.
Email:snoble@g.ucla.edu
Sarah T. Roberts
Roberts is a UCLA scholar in internet culture, politics and society, and digital labor studies. Her book, “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media,” is a study of the global workforce of commercial content moderators, from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, whose job it is to shield against hateful language, violent videos and online cruelty uploaded by social media users.
Roberts is faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute.
Email: sarah.roberts@ucla.edu
Reproductive rights and LGBTQ topics
Melissa Goodman
Goodman is the executive director of the UCLA Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy, which engages with community organizations, scholars, lawmakers, practitioners and advocates on reproductive health, law and policy. She is an expert on reproductive rights law and policy, access post-Supreme Court Dobbs decision, maternal health policy, fertility treatment access, economic justice for pregnant people and families, the intersection of the criminal, legal and family policing systems with reproductive health and families, LGBTQ law, sex education and workplace discrimination.
Email: goodmanm@law.ucla.edu
Election outcomes and public opinion
Lynn Vavreck
Vavreck,UCLA’sMarvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy, isan expert on presidential campaigns, elections and public opinion. She is available to address the changing dynamics of the race and whether to expect big vote shifts because of recent events.
She is the author of “The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy,” co-authored with Chris Tausanovitch, “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America,” “The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election” and “The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns.”
Email: vavreck@mac.com
Immigration and trade
Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda
Hinojosa-Ojedais an associate professor in the UCLA Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and the author of “The Trump Paradox: Migration, Trade, and Racial Politics in U.S.–Mexico Integration.” He researches the impacts of trade, investment and migration in the U.S., Mexico, Latin American and the Pacific Rim.
Email: hinojosa@ucla.edu
Cecilia Menjivar
Menjivar is the Dorothy L. Meier Professor of Social Equities and a professor of sociology. Her research centers on the effects of immigration law and enforcement practices on immigrants' livesas well as gender-based violence in Central America. Her expertise includes immigration law and policy, democracy and authoritarianism, legal statuses, family dynamics and community contexts that immigrants, mostly from Central Americans, encounter in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Email: menjivar@soc.ucla.edu
Jason De Leon
De Leon is a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American studies who serves as director of UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. The author of “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” he is an expert on the study of migration and the human consequences of immigration policy, with a focus on undocumented migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Email: jdeleon@ucla.edu
Christopher Tang
Christopher Tang is a distinguished professor of business administrationin the UCLA Anderson School of Management and an expert on supply chain management, retailing, outsourcing and business in Asia. His recent research has focused on howto build environmentally and socially sustainable supply chains in the U.S. to create jobs, reduce carbon emissions and improve the economy.
Email:chris.tang@anderson.ucla.edu
Voting rights
Sonni Watnin
Waknin is the UCLA Voting Rights Project program manager and voting rights counsel with experience in California, Washington and Kansas. She recently defended the constitutionality of the Washington Voting Rights Act from a legal challenge. She is available for comment on voting rights.
Email: sonni@uclavrp.org
Bernadette Reyes
Reyes is a staff attorney with the UCLA’s Voting Rights Project and anexpert in voting rights law and redistricting. Prior to joining the Voting Rights Project, Bernadette worked in public interest law, specifically working with a non-profit organization representing parents in child welfare proceedings at the trial and appellate level and participating in policy advocacy.
Email: bernadette@uclavrp.org
