Three Tickets Vie to Lead Harvard Institute of Politics in Contested Election

Three tickets will compete to lead the Harvard Institute of Politics in elections this weekend, setting up a contested race after the current executive team ran unopposed last year.

IOP members will choose a president and vice president, along with a treasurer, and communications director to serve for the 2027 calendar year.

Nearly 1,000 IOP members will be eligible to cast their ballots through an online form, which opens Saturday morning and closes Sunday night. Candidates released their platforms to IOP members through a digital voter guide Monday morning.

The three tickets running for president and vice president are Rhea P. Maniar ’28 and Justin D. Dunning ’28; Scarlett E. Eldaief ’28 and Henry D. Pahlow ’28; and Tucker Coombs ’28 and Alfredo Hernandez ’28.

The president and vice president will again be elected on joint tickets after the IOP’s Student Advisory Committee rejected a proposal in April to elect the two positions separately.

Last year, Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27 and William M. Smialek ’27 were named president and vice president after no other ticket ran. The pair dropped their plan to serve as co-presidents in April after student pushback.

Maniar and Dunning’s platform centers on three goals — transparency, capacity, and inclusivity. The ticket has pledged to require IOP programs to publish their selection rubrics alongside their applications and to commit to dates by which applicants will hear back.

Maniar chairs CIVICS, a joint IOP and Phillips Brooks House Association program, and previously served as the organizing director of the Harvard Votes Challenge. Dunning chairs the Conservative Coalition and previously served as chief of staff for the Fellows and Study Groups program.

Dunning said the pair decided to run after a year on SAC, during which they saw little positive change in the organization.

He recalled emailing programs to ask about the status of his applications, only to receive a mass rejection minutes later.

“So, you just forgot to reject me,” Dunning said. “That time is over.”

Maniar said that program chairs often feel pressure to “artificially reject” applicants so their programs appear as selective as other exclusive organizations on campus.

“Every year the IOP says that they have a record number of applications,” she said.

“What they don’t tell you is that’s a record number of rejections,” Dunning added.

Previous IOP teams have pledged to ensure every IOP applicant is admitted to at least one program, a promise Dunning said “has failed.” The ticket said it would revive the guarantee by pulling the full list of applicants and convening program chairs at a roundtable to place each one.

The pair also pledged to add an optional, confidential demographic question to the IOP Common App, visible only to staff and the Executive Team, covering race, gender, region, and ideology.

Dunning was a member of the Conservative Coalition when then-IOP President Pratyush “Prat” Mallick ’25 wrote a November 2024 op-ed in The Crimson arguing the IOP could no longer remain nonpartisan after President Donald Trump’s election. Dunning said the episode made it harder for conservative members to feel they could bring their perspective to the IOP.

“We’re willing as exec to put in the work,” Dunning said. “The time for an exclusive IOP is over.”

“The IOP isn’t for SAC,” he added, “It’s for the members of the IOP.”

Eldaief and Pahlow are running on a platform of increasing accessibility and recentering the institute around public service. The pair has pledged to create entry-level positions within competitive programs and to build collaboration across programs.

To make the IOP more accessible, the pair proposed “stepping-stone freshman fall positions” that would allow students to demonstrate interest and learn more about competitive programs before applying in the spring.

Eldaief said this initiative, along with transparent application rubrics and a program shopping period, would combat nepotism and help more students engage in the IOP.

“It felt as though the people who were getting into these programs were the people who were getting this ‘whisper, whisper’ inside knowledge from upperclassmen that they had already known,” Eldaief said, referring to her own experience in freshman fall.

Pahlow, who chairs the Campaigns and Advocacy Program and previously led the Arts Coalition, said the pair’s background leading smaller programs would guide their approach to programming. Eldaief, a Crimson Editorial editor, previously chaired the Politics of Race and Ethnicity program before becoming director of operations and special projects.

“Since we both run smaller programs that traditionally don’t get the attention, the funding, the support from staff, I think we’ve learned how to to make the most of things, and still offer really high quality programming that doesn’t have to be competitive or exclusive,” Pahlow said.

Eldaief and Pahlow also pledged to increase programs’ access to high-profile speakers previously reserved for the JFK Jr. Forum.

“As somebody who runs a program that primarily engages with political strategists, we’ll bring in a major campaign manager, and I won’t hear about it until it’s posted on the website,” Pahlow said.

Eldaief said building collaborations with campus affinity groups and providing resources for women and students of color would be key components of her presidency.

“I as an Egyptian woman look around the IOP leadership room, and I see very few people who look like me,” Eldaief said. “Affinity spaces on campus, for example, as I know from PRE chair, are hesitant to work with the IOP. They do not see the IOP as a welcoming space that they want to engage with, and I think that that is a shame.”

Coombs and Hernandez are running under the slogan “A New Day at the IOP,” with a platform that calls for open application rubrics, a public student budget, a published breakdown of how funding and staff support are distributed across programs, and a new role for general members to join IOP programming.

Coombs co-chairs the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum Committee and previously served as chief of staff for the FSG program. Hernandez chairs the FSG’s fellows search committee, serves as one of the IOP’s co-directors of diversity and engagement, and is co-president of the Harvard College Democrats.

Coombs said the pair, who both attended public schools, came to the IOP without knowing many people in it and wanted to make it easier for students to get involved “without having to know the right people or the right friend group.”

He said the IOP already has a strong foundation of staff and resources to build on.

“There are carpenters and there are arsonists,” Coombs said. “Alfredo and I are carpenters.”

Hernandez acknowledged that the three tickets’ messages largely overlap.

“If you listen to every ticket in this race, you’ll hear many of the same words regarding community, access, belonging,” he said, arguing that he and Coombs have “already turned those words into results.”

Coombs pointed to a role he created on the Forum Committee dedicated to outreach, and Hernandez said the FSG program admitted more first-time participants under his leadership than in past semesters.

Hernandez said that many students do not know how resources and staff support are distributed across the IOP’s 17 programs and four coalitions. The ticket pledged to publish a map of that distribution on its first day in office and to release the number of first-time participants across the IOP each semester.

The pair also pledged to circulate SAC agendas before meetings, distribute summaries afterward, publish guides for submitting proposals, and bring any member’s proposal to the committee for consideration.

“SAC is a governing board,” Coombs said. “It’s not a friend group.”

Hernandez said he understood why students might question whether the co-president of the Harvard College Democrats could serve every IOP member fairly.

“I think our record answers that the IOP is strongest when every political tradition on campus gets significant investment and respect.,” he said. “A conservative student, a progressive student can both see this institute as theirs.”

—Staff writer Jen L. Phan can be reached at [email protected] and Signal at jenphan.74. Follow her on X at @jenllphan.

—Staff writer Mirei S. Saneyoshi can be reached at [email protected] and Signal at mireisaneyoshi.09. Follow her on X at @mireisaneyoshi.