OXYTALK
Lessons From
Campaign Semester For the 14 undergrads who worked on campaigns nationwide, they learned a lot about American values, grassroots politics, messaging, T-shirts, and the myth of the perfect candidate Photo by Marc Campos
Campaign Semester participants Mickey Yao ’18, who worked on Jacky Rosen’s successful U.S. House race in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District; Meghan Hobbs ’18, who hit the trail for GOP congressional candidate Jack Martins on Long Island; and Ricardo Parada ’17, who worked on the Nevada Coordinated Campaign in Las Vegas.
34 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE
WINTER 2017
While the 2016 election felt all but inescapable for most of us leading up to the November 8 vote, 14 Oxy students lived and breathed nothing but politics as participants in Campaign Semester. Scattered across nine states around the country, students spent 10 weeks in the trenches of some of the most heated races up and down the ballot. While receiving college credit for their internships —still the only program of its kind in the country—they had front-row seats to the most memorable election of a generation. “These students learned a lot about themselves, they learned a lot about democracy and its flaws and strengths, and they learned a lot about America,” said Peter Dreier, the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, who organized the program with politics professor Regina Freer. “Even though this was for many of them a depressing outcome on the national level, most of them somehow have hope that we can overcome this and turn America into a better place, because they met people who don’t fit the stereotype. They saw how complicated people are.” In sharing their findings at a gathering in Choi Auditorium on December 8, a number of common threads emerged among the students’ experiences. Interestingly, they all concurred that the Electoral College should be abolished. Among other conclusions: There’s more to winning a race than just looking good on paper. “We get obsessed on the Democratic side with building the perfect candidate,” said Seth Miller ’18, a politics major from Vermillion, S.D., who worked for Tammy Duckworth’s U.S. Senate campaign