Abigail Thernstrom (September 14, 1936 – April 10, 2020) was an American political scientist and a leading conservative scholar on race relations, voting rights and education.
According to the New York Times, she and her husband Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, "are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit, where they forcefully argue that racial preferences are wrong, divisive, and as a tool to help minorities overrated."
She and her husband also co-authored No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon and Schuster, October 2003), named by both the Los Angeles Times and the American School Board Journal as one of the best books of 2003 and the winner of the 2007 Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship.
She often spoke to the media about voting rights, education, and other issues and appeared on Good Morning America, Fox News Sunday, and This Week with George Stephanopoulos, among other places.
Because of their differing opinions on civil rights, President Bill Clinton chose her as one of three authors to participate in his first "town meeting" on race in Akron, Ohio, on December 3, 1997.