Klara Fredrickssen is teaching a class on U.S. elections, just as the general election is wrapping up.

Has an elections-focused class been taught before? What are you enjoying about it?

It’s been taught before but not by me. I’m really liking it so far. The benefit of doing it when an election is happening is that students already have an interest, but you can also tie [the course] to major events, which so far has mostly been the debate. I think it’s working well so far and it’s been really fun.

Your students learned about and watched campaign ads in class today — what are some other upcoming lessons?

Because they’re doing a campaign simulation, we’re doing a lot of campaign strategy and figuring out how elections work. We’ll also be discussing democratic implications of elections and the role they fill in democracies. Later, we’ll talk about election law, how it works, and why it works that way, as well as voting rights and voter suppression and behavior — who votes, why they vote, how they choose who to vote for. We’ll be getting into that stuff mostly after the election.

Have you thought about how you’re going to conduct class the day after the presidential election and what it could look like?

I assigned one reading for the day, so we’re doing at least one thing concrete on the day, but I’m hoping it’ll mostly be run by student interest, which will be interesting because we have class on Wednesdays, and we don’t know if the election will be called by then [on Nov. 6]. It took four days last time, so that remains to be seen. Either way, there are congressional elections too. I taught classes before where we had class after an election day in 2022, and it ended up being that the students had so many different things they were interested in [talking about] that it took the whole class, so I figure that’s what’s going to happen. It does become a bit disorganized, but we’ll just see what we know and what we don’t know.

Can you talk about the Senate race simulation project?

Students have group projects where they’re running what I’m calling a campaign simulation. Essentially, they each were assigned a Senate race or a Senate candidate specifically that have different “characters”: Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tim Sheehy in Montana, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Ted Cruz in Texas, who is an incumbent and favored, Sam Brown, who is challenging a favored incumbent in Nevada. Very different types of races.

Their job is to essentially “run” their entire campaign. They have a certain amount of tasks they need to divide equally: working with the media, deciding fundraising plans, picking a calendar, deciding the ad schedule, where the candidate will appear, and what are the issues — basically everything for a campaign. They all will present the plan as their midterm project, one presentation as a group where they’re telling us their strategy, and they each have an individual paper on their own tasks. They asked if they have to win, and I said no — you can’t make the candidates follow your plan!

As a fairly new professor here, how has Beloit been?

I really enjoy it. I’ve only been at big schools with big lecture classes. I went to graduate school at the University of Texas-Austin and taught big classes there. It’s really nice when you can do discussions and readings that we can actually talk about. It’s really different, and I enjoy it so far.