Election experts from DePaul University available to discuss key 2024 campaign topics

CHICAGO — Just 15 months away from Election Day 2024, campaigns for the presidency and Senate are well underway. More than a dozen Republican presidential candidates are jockeying to advance out of the primary and into the general election, while several key Senate seats are up for grabs. With the first Republican presidential debate set for Aug. 23, DePaul University experts are available to discuss campaign and debate strategy. Experts can also discuss voting rights, election law and more. Experts include:

Voting Rights

Manoj Mate
Associate Professor, College of Law; Faculty Director, Racial Justice Initiative

Manoj Mate’s interdisciplinary research focuses on public law, constitutional law, election law and voting rights, and comparative constitutional law. He can discuss the details and implications of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings for the 2024 elections and the broader challenges facing voters.

Christina Rivers
Associate Professor of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Christina Rivers is a voting rights expert who collaborated on the Re-Entering Citizens Civic Education Act, which was signed into Illinois law by Governor J.B. Pritzker in 2019. An Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program faculty member for DePaul, Rivers is available to discuss voter access and awareness for citizens with a felony conviction and for eligible voters in jail, recent efforts in Illinois and elsewhere to expand that access, the Supreme Court’s decisions on minority voting rights, ballot access and integrity, and representation.

Campaigns, Debates & Political Marketing

Bruce Newman
Professor of Marketing, Driehaus College of Business

Bruce Newman is a leading expert on political marketing. He can discuss the role of the political party in a post-Trump era, marketing tactics that will work in the 2024 presidential campaign, age and the presidential campaign, and the impact of Russia on the election. He is the author of “The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential Elections Can Teach Us About Effective Marketing,” which highlights the infrastructure changes in the U.S. political system and puts forward the model followed by Donald Trump to win the 2016 presidential election.

R. Craig Sautter
School of Continuing and Professional Studies

Craig Sautter is author of “Inside the Wigwam: Chicago Presidential Conventions 1860-1996” and two other books on presidential conventions and elections. He has co-written and co-produced scores of radio and television political ads for candidates running for office — from mayor to Congress — across the nation since the 1990s. He also teaches a course on “Chicago Politics: Bosses & Reformers” among others. For several years, he traveled across the nation as a field coordinator for the National Urban League’s voter registration/political education program. Sautter also served two terms on the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Advisory Board. He can speak about both national and local races.

Political Theory

David Lay Williams
Professor of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

A scholar of political theory, David Lay Williams has written on a variety of topics, including democracy, republicanism, deception, civic virtue, fear and inequality. He also occasionally writes short pieces on contemporary politics as they evoke enduring themes in political theory for outlets like The Washington Post, The Hill and Bloomberg. Williams is the author of several books including, most recently, “The Greatest of All Plagues: Economic Inequality in Western Political Thought” (Princeton, 2024), which traces how inequality has been understood from Plato through Marx. He will co-teach a course this year on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and co-direct a public roundtable on Tocqueville’s relevance today.

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