Two Tuesdays ago—Cornel West’s last day in New York before Election Day—I went into town to visit him at his luxury apartment complex in Morningside Heights, between Seminary Row and Reinhold Niebuhr Place. He met me in the lobby and greeted me as “brother,” which was also the way he greeted one of his neighbors, several doormen, and anyone he knew or politely pretended to know, except those he called “sister” . “These are some grim and gloomy times, brother,” he told me as he walked around looking for a place to sit. ‘How did Twain say it? ‘That damn human race?’

In a profile published in this magazine, West was described as “one of the most high-profile academics in the United States.” That was thirty years ago, and it’s been that way ever since. One of his colleagues recently called him “undeniably the leading American public intellectual of my generation.” Trained as a post-analytic philosopher, he subsequently rose to prominence through his best-selling books, his frequent appearances on cable news and his cameos in “The Matrix” sequels. He was also a tireless political surrogate, crisscrossing the country in search of Bill Bradley, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders – all of whom he has since criticized from the left. Last October, following Hamas’ attacks in Israel and the start of the Israeli army’s retaliatory campaign, some members of Congress, including Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called for a ceasefire. But “it took Brother Bernie several months to even use the word,” West said. “We’re not talking about the highest level of moral heroism just for the sake of using it word. So I think he’s 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 Union Theological Seminary, affiliated with Columbia—where he got his first faculty job in the 1970s, and where he recently returned after Yale, Princeton, and two tumultuous periods. at Harvard, but he is on leave this semester as he is also running for president. “I’ve been at it for 17 months and have seen the layers of corruption in the system,” he said. He is campaigning as an independent, on a shoestring budget, opposing both “neo-fascist gangster” Donald Trump and “multicultural militarist” Kamala Harris. Along the way, he continued, “I have met some of the most wonderful 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 surveys collected by Real Clear Polling, West had a negative rating, which wasn’t unusual — Trump and Harris did, too. (The only 2024 candidates to surface were Tim Walz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) More pertinently, West consistently had the lowest name recognition of all the candidates mentioned in those surveys. Even Real Clear Polling didn’t spell his name correctly.

There is a private meeting room in West’s apartment complex, furnished with chic art books and a long wooden conference table, but it appeared to be occupied. “That’s okay,” he said, making himself comfortable just outside the room in a backed armchair. He often calls himself a “jazz man,” always ready to improvise – a method he has used throughout his life and career, and especially during his presidential campaign. Last June, he announced that he would seek the nomination of the People’s Party, which is considered marginal even by supporters of third-party politics. He briefly switched to the Green Party, a more established independent party; but he did not get along well with Jill Stein, the party’s perennial candidate, and eventually left after a few months. “There were moments of dishonesty and disrespect,” West said. (Politico called it “the latest rift within the perennially bickering American left.”)

He is now the nominee of the Justice for All Party, founded in 2024 by Cornel West. His campaign never gained much traction. He did a lot of podcast interviews, but very little on mainstream TV. On Election Day, it looks like he’ll be lucky if he wins by more than a percentage point in any state. Yet he is on the ballot in sixteen states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan. A few thousand votes in one of those states – or even a few hundred – could theoretically be enough to tip the election.

Last summer, The nation published an editorial praising West’s “prophetic voice and moral clarity” but questioning his strategy. Why not enter the Democratic primary, where, even if he couldn’t win, he could “exert useful pressure by presenting the left alternative”? West told me it would be a violation for a Democrat to violate his robbery– his calling. He was referring to Max Weber’s 1919 lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” in which “he makes the crucial distinction between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility,” he said. “So you have to worry about the consequences” — for example, running a campaign that risks swinging the election to Trump — “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 associates and asked what they thought of his presidential ambitions; the vast majority refused to speak on the record, or couldn’t think of anything complimentary to say, or both. Kaivan Shroff, a Democratic commentator, took a course called American Democracy, co-taught by West, as a law student at Harvard. “I loved him as a professor,” Shroff said. “As far as why he ran and why he’s still in the race? My guess would be self-centeredness.”

Last September, political strategist Peter Daou became West’s campaign manager. Daou, who had been a high-level campaign aide 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 to someone with knowledge of the campaign strategy, who said Daou and West discussed a very targeted campaign, perhaps focusing on HBCUs and on Black voters in the South — especially Black men who were dissatisfied with Joe Biden and Harris and toward Trump tended. By winning over a significant portion of those voters, the thinking went, the campaign could perhaps reach 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 flyover states, only the United States!” Daou lasted a month and a half before quitting.

The campaign has very few full-time employees; Among the most active unofficial advisors 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-running campaigns, this one has made some stunning 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 Judge Clarence Thomas. “As an independent candidate and a free black man,” West wrote on X, “I am not bought and no longer in charge. Despite my deep political differences with brother Harlan Crow (who is an anti-Trump Republican), I have known him for several years in a non-political setting and I pray for his dear family.” The next day he announced that he would refund the donation. Last August, the Associated Press reported that “a group of lawyers with close ties to the Republican Party” was working to get the West on the ballot in Arizona, ostensibly to siphon votes away from Harris, and then reported that similar efforts were also underway were underway. in North Carolina. (One of the lawyers, Paul Hamrick, denied the allegations in an email to The New Yorkerin which he wrote in part, “I have had no involvement whatsoever with the Republican Party.”) “So much of American politics is very much gangster-like activity,” West told the Associated Press. “I don’t know who they are or anything, nothing at all. We just want to get that ballot.”