What does Cornel West think?

Two Tuesdays ago — Cornel West's last day in New York before Election Day — I drove downtown to visit him at his high-end apartment building in Morningside Heights, between Seminary Row and Reinhold Niebuhr Place. He met me in the lobby and greeted me as “brother,” and so he also greeted one of his neighbors, several bouncers, and everyone else he knew or politely pretended to know, except those he called “sister.” “These are dark and gloomy times, brother,” he told me as he walked around looking for a place to sit. “How did Twain put it? 'This damn humanity'?”

In a profile that appeared in this magazine, West was described as “one of the most talked-about academics in the United States.” That was three decades ago and it has been true ever since. One of his colleagues recently called him “undeniably the leading American public intellectual of my generation.” He trained as a post-analytic philosopher and then rose to fame through his best-selling books, his frequent cable news talk show appearances, and his guest appearances on sequels to The Matrix. He was also a tireless political surrogate, crisscrossing the country to campaign for Bill Bradley, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders – all of whom he has since criticized from the left. Last October, after Hamas attacks in Israel and the start of the Israeli military's retaliatory campaign, some members of Congress, including Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called for a ceasefire. However, “it took Brother Bernie several months to even use the word,” West said. “We don't talk about the highest level of moral heroism – just to use it Word. So I think he lost some credibility there. I love the brother no matter what – I just don’t agree with him.”

Now seventy-one, West is a professor at Columbia-affiliated Union Theological Seminary—where he got his first teaching job in the 1970s and where he recently returned after Yale, Princeton, and two tumultuous stints at Harvard—but he is this semester on leave because he is also running for president. “I have been here for seventeen months and have seen the layers of corruption in the system,” he said. As an independent on a tight budget, he fights against the “neo-fascist gangster” Donald Trump and the “multicultural militarist” Kamala Harris. Along the way, he continued: “I have met some of the greatest people in the world, but they feel helpless, if not hopeless. They see the layers of billionaires reshaping the entire destiny of the nation, and they see it in both parties.” According to polls compiled by Real Clear Polling, West had a negative popularity rating, which wasn't unusual – Trump and Harris did too. (The only 2024 candidates who were afloat were Tim Walz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) More significantly, West consistently had the lowest name recognition of any candidate named in these polls. Even Real Clear Polling didn't spell its name correctly.

There is a private meeting room in West's apartment building, furnished with chic art books and a long wooden conference table, but it appeared to be occupied. “That’s all right,” he said, making himself comfortable in a wing chair outside the room. He often describes himself as a “jazz man,” always willing to improvise, a method he has used throughout his life and career, particularly during his presidential campaign. Last June, he announced he would seek the nomination of the People's Party, seen as marginal even by supporters of third-party politics. He briefly switched to the Greens, a more established independent party; But he didn't get along with Jill Stein, the party's permanent candidate, and eventually left the party after a few months. “There were moments of dishonesty and disrespect,” West said. (Politico called it “the latest rift within the ever-contentious American left.”)

He is now the candidate of the Justice for All Party, founded by Cornel West in 2024. His campaign never had much traction. He did many podcast interviews, but very few on mainstream television. On Election Day, he appears to be lucky if he wins by more than a percentage point in any state. Still, he is on the ballot in 16 states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan. A few thousand votes in one of these states – or even a few hundred – could theoretically be enough to decide the election.

Last summer, The nation published an editorial praising West's “prophetic voice and moral clarity” but questioning his strategy. Why not run in the Democratic primary, where even if he couldn't win, he could “exert useful pressure by presenting the left-wing alternative”? West told me that running as a Democrat would violate his rights profession– his calling. He referred to Max Weber's 1919 lecture “Politics as a Profession,” in which he “makes the crucial distinction between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility,” he said. “So you have to think about the consequences” — for example, of running a campaign that risks Trump winning the election — “without in any way violating your calling and your commitment to integrity and principles.” I contacted dozens of West's colleagues, friends, former students and staff and asked what they thought of his presidential ambitions. The vast majority either refused to speak publicly or could not think of anything competent to say, or both. Kaivan Shroff, a Democratic commentator, took a course called “American Democracy” as a law student at Harvard, which West co-taught. “I liked him as a professor,” Shroff said. “Why he ran and why he is still in the race? My guess would be egocentrism.”

Last September, political strategist Peter Daou became West's campaign manager. Daou, who had been a senior campaign staffer for John Kerry and Hillary Clinton before turning against the two-party system, was by far the most experienced political strategist in West's circle. I spoke with someone familiar with the campaign's strategy who said that Daou and West were discussing a narrowly targeted campaign, perhaps focused on HBCUs and black voters in the South – particularly black men, the Joe Biden and Harris were dissatisfied and leaning towards Trump. Perhaps by attracting a significant share of these voters the campaign could get to ten to fifteen percent in the polls and gain momentum from there. West did not follow this advice. “This campaign is committed to a 50-state strategy,” he tweeted last year, promoting a campaign event in Nebraska. “There are no overflying states, only the United States!” Daou lasted a month and a half before giving up.

The campaign has very few full-time staff; Among the most active unofficial advisers are Annahita Mahdavi West, who is also West's wife, and Clifton West, his brother. (“I have billions of brothers in the world,” West said, “but he is my only blood brother.”) Even by the standards of long-term campaigns, this one has made some startling missteps. Last October, it was reported that West had accepted a campaign donation from Harlan Crow, the conservative Texas billionaire best known for giving undeclared gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas. “As an independent candidate and a free black man,” West wrote on Environment and pray for his precious family.” The following day he announced that he would return the donation. In August of this year, the Associated Press reported that “a group of lawyers with close ties to the Republican Party” was working to get West on the ballot in Arizona, ostensibly to take votes away from Harris, and then reported that similar efforts were also underway are in North Carolina. (One of the lawyers, Paul Hamrick, denied the allegations in an email The New Yorkerin which he wrote, among other things, “I had no involvement whatsoever in the Republican Party.”) “A lot of American politics is very gangster-like,” West told the Associated Press. “I don’t know who they are or anything – nothing at all. We just want to take part in this vote.”