Carly Fiorina: On Running for President and Staying Engaged in our Democracy

November 8, 2023

SEASON 3, EPISODE 6: As we approach the 2024 presidential election, Carly Fiorina joins Governors Bredesen and Haslam to talk about running for president and the importance of civic education and engagement

To close out Season Three of You Might Be Right, our hosts, former Tennessee Governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, spoke with to Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and a presidential candidate in 2016, about what it takes to be a leader in divisive times and how civic education can create a more informed and engaged electorate. This episode was released on November 7, 2023, one year in advance of the 2024 presidential election.

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 “It was hard to put those two sides of the picture together”

Kicking off the conversation, Fiorina discussed why she decided to run for president. “I, like so many others, was utterly frustrated by the lack of responsiveness of key elected officials, the lack of problem-solving ability in so many of our public servants,” she said, and how her expectations aligned with her experience as a candidate. “What was the same as what I expected was the interactions with voters. That was of course the best part of the process. Voters ask very relevant, important, and insightful questions…The campaigning part with people was kind of the best of democracy,” she said.

What was different than she expected? “The entrance of Donald Trump changed the contest fundamentally,” she said. “That was very disorienting, honestly, to be in the middle of a process where suddenly everything you thought you knew about what was acceptable and what was not acceptable was turned on its head, juxtaposed against my interactions with voters, which were generally speaking very uplifting. So, it was hard to put those two sides of the picture together…it remains hard to this day.”

“The essence of problem-solving”

Throughout the conversation, Fiorina touched on a variety of other topics, from her advice to someone considering running for office, which was “Do something else first,” in order to gain valuable experience and perspective, to her advice for fellow CEOs considering whether or not to get involved in public policy matters. “Have a process that’s well understood and transparent…it should be a collective decision taken after thoughtful consideration and a process that’s been put in place ahead of time”. 

On the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for democracy, Fiorina noted there’s both good and bad news. The good news first: “Artificial intelligence can make many things more engaging,” she told Governors Bredesen and Haslam. “It can make education more engaging, it can make history more engaging .It can make solving previously insoluble problems possible.”

The scary side of it? “The dark side of artificial intelligence is, it can destroy history, rewrite history, recreate history,” she added. “What’s more frightening about it is that bad actors, Russia, China, Iran, Northern Korea, bad actors in our own country, bad actors will guaranteed 100% use AI in this upcoming election for their own purposes…This is real, and it can be really destructive. And we have to be clear-eyed about it. We have to sound the alarm. We have to call it out when we see it.”

Ultimately Fiorina, speaking with the governors just a few weeks before President Biden unveiled his sweeping Executive Order on AI, noted that she is “encouraged” by the collaboration happening between the tech industry and Washington, DC at the moment. “I actually think President Biden, Chuck Schumer are on the right track when they are bringing people together from the regulatory, the political side, the technology community to say, what is it that we can agree on? By the way, that’s the fundamental of problem-solving, to get people together who come from different spheres and different points of view to agree on a goal. We have to have some commonsense regulation and guardrails up around AI and by the way, social media as well. Let us work together to solve that problem. That’s the essence of problem-solving.”

Listen to our September 2023 episode on AI, “How Will AI Affect Democracy?” here.

“There’s something every single one of us can do to make something better”

Today, Fiorina is actively engaged in civics education and engagement work. “I actually think re-educating, reconnecting, reinspiring Americans with who we actually are and what and where we come from matters a lot,” she said. “The truth is that most Americans really could never pass the citizenship test. They don’t understand how our government is structure, they don’t understand why the Constitution is written the way it is, why our system of government is designed the way it is.”

Understanding the past is critical, she said. “I do not think we can be a fully functioning democracy, and I do not think we can remain a successful republic, unless we understand, like any family, like any community, who we are, where we come from, who we come from, and what we come from.”

Ultimately, one of her biggest concerns is people disengaging with the democratic process. “The worst thing for our democracy is for people to just check out, and way too many people have checked out,” she said. “There’s something you can do. It may be on a small scale in your own neighborhood, but there’s something every single one of us can do to make something better, so we should do it.”