Campaign Trail
Students of the 2008 Election
by Lailee Mendelson
Sophomore Zachary Simon is one of the lucky few whose life story has included an unwitting stumble upon the makings of history. The summer before he entered Emory as a freshman, he was looking for a job in his hometown of Chicago. He found something called Camp Obama, a crash-course in campaign strategy for people interested in volunteering for then-Senator Barack Obama, who had announced his run for the presidency only a few months before. Simon had heard the Illinois senator speak at his high school, but he wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. He started reading Obama’s policy papers and “quickly decided that this man needed to be our next president.” After completing training, he was offered an internship on the campaign’s national phone bank, which was bombarding Iowa with calls in advance of the caucuses. And so it was that Zachary Simon arrived at Obama’s volunteer headquarters, the nexus of what would become one of the most significant presidential campaigns in U.S. history. The scene is one he’ll never forget: a nearly empty office space, with only a few tables and chairs and volunteers sitting on the floor, working furiously on laptops. |
“We were starting with nothing. But there was enormous optimism,” he says. “No one in that office ever felt we couldn’t win, even though we were twenty to thirty points down in the polls. I wasn’t surprised when we won Iowa, because we had an army of volunteers working across the state. Everyone who did little things—like making phone calls or going door to door—gradually tipped the scale in Obama’s favor.”
In the months since the 2008 presidential election, Americans have weeded their lawns of campaign signs, interred election buttons in junk drawers, and bought up the November 5 edition of newspapers around the country. But for Emory College students who worked on the campaigns, what remains is perhaps the most intangible but valuable memento of all: a newfound sense of civic empowerment.
The impressive voter turnout among youth has been well documented. On Election Day, 23 million young people showed up at the polls, the largest number since 1972 and 3.4 million more than in the 2004 race. But those numbers tell only part of the story. They don’t capture the enthusiasm of a legion of young volunteers who, like hundreds of Emory students, spent the better part of two years dedicated to getting their candidate elected.
Campus Campaign
Campaigning activities on campus began in full force when students returned in the fall. At Wonderful Wednesdays, a biweekly community event held on Asbury Circle, members of the organizations Students for Barack Obama and Students for McCain set up tables and fielded questions about their candidates’ policies. They roamed the campus with clipboards, encouraging their fellow students to register to vote. Facebook pages built a community of support and kept students informed about campaign events such as phone banks and debate-watch parties.
The Obama campaigners had an established loyalty on their side. In an atmosphere of overwhelming youth enthusiasm for Obama, students campaigning for John McCain reported experiences one might imagine a Pepsi salesman would face on the Emory campus. “It’s not easy,” says sophomore Savan Shah, president of Students for McCain. “Sometimes people refused to hear me out. Even if someone supported McCain, it was difficult to get them involved. I think there are many closet Republicans.”
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| L-R: Jordan Krenz, Zachary Simon, Cole Youngner | ||
Looking back, Shah wonders whether he could have offered more volunteer opportunities for those students who stood behind McCain. He points to another factor that contributed to low Republican activism on campus: in contrast to the Obama campaign, McCain had no official presence in Georgia, no staff to organize teams of volunteers. Though there were plenty of opportunities for students to work with county GOP offices, those mostly focused on local races.
“It could feel futile at times, campaigning your heart out for McCain when the majority of the students on campus are liberal,” says freshman Jordan Krenz, who worked the Students for McCain booth at every Wonderful Wednesday. “But that didn’t mean we weren’t going to try.” Krenz relished the challenge of answering the tough questions posed to her, which she says honed her understanding of McCain’s platform. By representing the less popular view, she feels she provided an important civic service for the campus.
“To be an informed voter, you have to be aware of all sides of an issue,” she says. “Our main goal was to get McCain’s voice out there so that the student body would know there was another side before they made their decision.”
But even though their guy didn’t win (“this time,” Shah hastens to add), both students say they were inspired by the civic energy they saw on campus.
Knocking on America’s Door
“I wondered, why are they doing this?” Simon says, describing one of his first days of training with the Obama camp. He had been asked to call registered Republicans in Indiana. “But it wasn’t long before I realized it was exactly the right thing for me to be doing. You learn more about yourself and how to explain your views in a concise way when you’re forced to talk to people with totally opposing ideas.”
Students who worked the phones, or spent time on foot canvassing neighborhoods, recall this direct contact with voters as one of their most valuable experiences. The exchanges took place across a wide geographic and socioeconomic landscape, from rural South Carolina and Iowa to Atlanta’s affluent suburbs and public housing developments. They often reached well beyond politics into people’s private lives and fears. Together, they amounted to an intimate conversation with the nation.
“When you’re at Emory, it’s sometimes hard to see what people are going through across America,” says Jonathan Beam 08C, who spent his 2007–08 winter break knocking on doors in Iowa and encouraging people to get out to the caucuses in support of Hillary Clinton. “I heard stories about people getting in a car wreck and then having to file for bankruptcy because they couldn’t pay their health care bills. Or people who’d lost their pensions after factories closed. You hear these stories and you think, this is not the country I want to live in.”
“It allowed me to get out of the Emory bubble,” says junior Rafael Davis about his time canvassing for Obama in South Carolina. “It’s humanizing to hear people tell their personal stories and relate to them on a one-on-one basis, rather than thinking of them as potential votes.”
And there were the surprising moments, too, such as when Davis knocked on a door in Columbia, South Carolina, during primary season. “The guy who lived there was John Edwards’ cousin— and he was an Obama supporter!”
Because of Obama’s unprecedented grassroots network, students who supported him had an abundance of opportunities for fieldwork. Junior Cole Youngner took fall semester off after winning a paid position with the campaign as regional field director and Get Out the Vote lead for DeKalb, Rockdale, and Newton counties. In the months leading up to the November election, he clocked nearly 100 hours per week recruiting, training and managing volunteer teams.
It was a radical task, he says, something that had not been tried in Georgia before. While traditional campaign strategy relies on candidate visibility and advertising, he explains, “What we were doing was completely different. We put all our energy into talking to people and voter registration drives. And it worked.” He proudly points to the numbers as proof of the power of collective action: Obama won both Rockdale and Newton counties, both of which had gone to Bush in 2004 by a margin of 20 percent. “It feels unbelievable to know that if you want to make a difference, and you’re willing to work hard and get people to work with you, it really will happen,” Youngner says. “It’s not just a cliché.”
The Thousand-Vote Surprise
Generating support for their candidate wasn’t a problem for Students for Barack Obama. But converting that fervor into electoral currency— votes—was a different matter. “It’s tough to get students to vote,” laments sophomore Brett Henson, president of the organization.
Henson, who had gained community-organizing skills in his hometown of Elko, Nevada, where he canvassed for Obama before the caucuses, had one overriding goal in mind: to register as many students to vote as possible. And not just to vote, but to vote in Georgia, even if that meant unregistering in their home states. “We knew Georgia had the potential to be competitive,” he says. “So we wanted to make sure that each student’s vote counted. Also, because the absentee ballot process can be complicated in many states, registering them to vote in person made it much more likely that they’d vote at all.”
Registration coordinator Zachary Simon led a campuswide effort to make it happen. Volunteers could be found at Wonderful Wednesdays, at booths in the DUC, and at every major event, helping students begin the process. Dorm coordinators Rafael Davis and Ashley Flint worked to build a group of volunteers responsible for registering students in each residence hall. Even so, Simon says, it wasn’t always easy to cut through the apathy and convince students to register.
In the end, the results surprised everyone: nearly one thousand registered new voters on campus.
The next step was to physically place students at the polling stations on November 4. During advance voting, Students for Barack Obama organized buses to shuttle nearly 300 student voters to the polls. Yet up until the very end, Henson was worried about turnout. “I was very happily proven wrong on election day,” he says, and is proud that his organization’s efforts contributed to cutting the margin of McCain’s Georgia victory.
Breaking the Myth of a Generation’s Apathy
It’s clear that working with the campaigns left an indelible mark on these students’ undergraduate education. But now that the excitement is over, will the call to civic action fade?
Not according to them.
Senior Ashley Flint, one of the dorm coordinators for Students for Barack Obama, says she never had much interest in politics before the election. Her experience campaigning on campus and interning in Obama’s D.C. senate office over the summer has changed all that. “It was the first time I felt that my opinion mattered, and that my help was needed,” she says. “The campaign stands as a testament to what we can do if we work together.”
Savan Shah looks forward to a Republican revival. “I feel more excited now about the future of the Republican Party and conservatism than I did before,” he says. “I honestly feel that at this point we can only move forward.”
Zachary Simon went on to become president of Students for Jim Martin, leading an (unsuccessful) effort to beat Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss in the December U.S. Senate runoff.
Rafael Davis says his experience has convinced him to work as a community organizer after graduation.
And Jonathan Beam was so inspired by his experience that he moved to California following graduation to work on Democratic Congressman Jerry McNerney’s re-election campaign. He has since relocated to D.C. to continue working in politics.
Beam describes a sentiment common to many of the students when he talks about his emotions on election night, after all the hard work, the phone calling, canvassing, emailing, and organizing was finally over. “I looked across the room at people my parents’ age, and they were all crying. No one was talking,” he says. “One day, I’ll hopefully be able to tell my grandchildren that I was a part of this, this moment when we all came together and made history.”