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Professor Geoffrey Layman, chair of the Political Science Department, has taught at the University of Notre Dame for fifteen years. Since 2016, students across all academic disciplines have fought through lengthy wait lists and tense competition for a seat in Professor Layman’s live, real-time Election 2024 class. This fall, Professor Layman is teaching the course for the third time, and the excitement surrounding it remains as high as ever.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did the idea for a real-time election course come to fruition?

I've actually been doing these for a long time. When I was in graduate school — this is going to show my age — I did Election 1992. Then in my first job, I did Election 1996. Then I didn't do it for a while, but Professor Campbell and I decided that we would team-teach a really large Election 2016 class and then we did it again in 2020, and then the university said you can't team teach with fellow faculty in your own department. So, that's why I'm doing it. Of course, I'm team-teaching with a graduate student, James Kirk, this time. So, it's been around for a while. Presidential elections are the most conspicuous event on the American political stage, and it's when most people are most interested in politics — so it seems like a good time to learn about and talk about a lot of the things that go on in elections and the issues that are discussed, as well as various aspects of American democracy and whether they're really democratic or not.

As political polarization has increased and elections have become more divisive, have you had to alter your approach to teaching this class?

I think the only thing that I've altered, to be honest, is what I said on the very first day of class, which is that I always try to be objective, not take sides, and try to hide my own political biases as much as I can. But after January 6, 2021, I decided that I would tell classes that I'm not objective when it comes to democracy, and if I see candidates or political parties clearly violating small “d” democratic principles, that I will call that out. I don't mean to be biased toward the liberal or conservative side or the Democratic or Republican side. But I think if we care about democracy as we claim to in the United States and as we certainly do here at Notre Dame, those violations of democratic norms should be called out and should not be just treated as part of the normal process of American politics. So that's probably the only thing — but I am a much better teacher now than I was in 1992 when I was twenty-three years old.

What do you hope students will take away from this course?

I think just an understanding of how American elections work, how they've changed over time and how they are democratic or not — both in the regular course of things in this year and in recent elections. Also, how we can make them more democratic and how we can make them better. I think it seems a little quixotic to say that anybody in a class of 85 people can really change American politics — but it’s a prestigious university, and you guys are of an age where you're going to have more and more political influence in years to come. I think understanding where the problems are in our electoral system beyond just any particular candidates, and what can be fixed and, and how we might make the process better — more democratic, more representative — that's important. It's also just kind of fun if you like politics, but also just understanding how to be a good consumer of all the media attention that presidential elections get, and understanding how polls work and how the primary and the nomination process works. I think that can certainly help make the people in the class better voters. But I think the hope is that beyond that it actually has some bearing on what people do with their lives and the degree to which they want to try to make our electoral process better. The electoral process is not the be-all, end-all of American democracy, but it's pretty central to it. If that process is undemocratic, it's pretty hard to expect that what goes on in the halls of Congress, or in the White House, or in relations between the White House and Congress, are going to be democratic.

What role do you think younger voters, like the many here at Notre Dame, will play in shaping the outcome of this election and the future of democracy?

Well, I think younger voters are always very important, younger voters are always the demographic that has the lowest voter turnout, so there's room for improvement, but there's also room for fairly significant influence on election outcomes, especially in battleground states. So, depending on where the younger voters live, they can have more or less influence. I think in the years to come, many Notre Dame students are going to be the kinds of people who are running for elected office and for Congress, or serving in administrations in Washington or working for interest groups that play some role in our politics. So, I think the impact that they can have on our democracy is big, and the biggest impact is preserving that democracy and making sure we don't walk farther down a path toward authoritarianism.