Political science professor shares her knowledge as election-night analyst

by Chuck Gordon

Dr. Chelsea Kaufman loves to talk politics - even with a camera shoved in her face.

"I remember one time they had a man with a steady cam like six inches away from my face," Kaufman says, about serving as an analyst on election night on WCNC in Charlotte. "You're supposed to pretend that you're just hanging out with the anchors and having a little chat."

She adjusted well, calmly and authoritatively giving her well-researched takes on local, state and national races on Tuesday. From 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. on the big night, she appeared three times an hour on WCNC's streaming app and on YouTube.

Kaufman's career has primed her for nights like this. After earning her Ph.D. from Purdue University, she started teaching political science at Wingate University in the fall of 2018, and since then she's appeared on numerous podcasts and given talks in front of hundreds of people.

Now an associate professor, Kaufman spends hours a day in front of her classes, which helped her keep any personal biases from showing as she discussed a variety of topics with WCNC anchors Vanessa Ruffes and Colin Mayfield, such as the voting gender gap, election integrity and the effect of a breaking scandal this fall on the governor's race.

"I practice that every day of my life as a professor in this subject area," she says. "Students ask me questions about things all the time that require me to talk about stuff in a neutral way, even if that's not how I feel about it as an individual."

At one point, the anchors brought Kaufman out of the green room to get her reaction as Mark Robinson gave his concession speech to governor-elect Josh Stein. She was careful to stick to the substance of the speech and the race, even though Robinson's campaign was torpedoed this fall by reports that he had made inflammatory comments on the messageboard of a porn site a decade ago.

"We were focusing on what the race meant for North Carolina and what it meant for the future of politics and his campaign, not, 'Are you sad that Mark Robinson won or lost?'" Kaufman says. "It's not that you can't say that he was involved in a scandal. It's just that it's not my role to say, 'I think he should have won regardless of that scandal' or 'You shouldn't vote for him because he's a horrible person because of that scandal, and that's why I'm glad he lost.'"

In 2016, Wingate political science professor Dr. Joseph Ellis, now associate dean of the Cannon College of Arts and Sciences, appeared on WCNC's election-night coverage in a similar role. Because of Covid-19, the station didn't have in-studio analysts in 2020, and this year Ellis was again asked if he was interested in appearing. He steered them toward Kaufman, who specializes in voting-related topics.

As she did after the general election four years ago, this spring she'll teach a class called U.S. Campaigns and Elections, taking students through the history of campaigning in the United States. This fall she presented two popular Lyceum events regarding the election: One on the electoral college and another on how to vote and how to get unbiased information about the election.

On Tuesday night, Kaufman came away with something else she plans to relay to students: a strong impression of the media.

"They do a lot of fact-checking," she says. "They go and talk to the people who are working with this every day in our community. At one point they asked me, 'How can we increase trust in our elections in the community?' I said, 'Exactly what you're doing right now: give coverage to it, so that people know the local information.'"

Just having her on the broadcast, she says, should make people feel better about their coverage of politics.

"The anchors, they were really knowledgeable about it as well, and they probably could have said a lot of the things that I said," she says. "But it can also help to have more than one perspective. You know it's not just the one person you have to put your trust or faith in but multiple people are echoing this, and that can help the viewer have more faith in the legitimacy of it."

All in all, Kaufman says that being in the studio on election night was more fun than watching the results roll in from her couch. And she'd be glad to come back again.

"The producer said, 'Don't worry. We'll only make you talk about 10 minutes per hour,'" she says. "I was like, 'I can talk about this for 16 weeks straight!'"

Nov. 7, 2024

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