Life After SCC
BACKING BIDEN FROM BRITAIN Two recent Old Columbans worked for the Florida Democrats in the 2020 United States Presidential Election. They share their experiences with the Columban community. Roll back to March 2020. The world was trundling along uninterrupted, with the likelihood of two septuagenarians offering a muchthe-same US presidential election – the mainstream Joe Biden v. the continued collision course of Trump. How wrong we were. Sure, Americans ended up with the much-expected choice of Biden/Trump, but curveball after curveball came their way. And COVID-19 was only the tip of the iceberg. Six months before the election, no-one predicted that Trump would leave the White House. So how does a British guy from Hertfordshire end up being involved in all this? After finishing my degree and sabbatical at Durham University, and before starting a graduate scheme, I was looking for an imaginative way to fill my summer. Some would’ve gone backpacking in Thailand…I wanted to volunteer for the Democrat campaign. A vague idea – and one I had no idea how to achieve. Through a fluke recommendation on the last day of applications, I came across Politrip – a scheme that connected young British, American politics-enthusiasts to Democrat campaigns. It was too good an opportunity to miss.
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From then on, I became a Fellow of the Democrats. I was originally meant to spend six weeks in Arlington, right on the doorstop of Washington DC. But like so much of our lives, COVID-19 turned that on its head. Instead I beamed into Biden’s Miami campaign virtually from Hertfordshire, without quite the same tropical weather. Whilst a completely different experience, it amazed me how you can still engage voters through text and phone banking – making well over one-thousand calls. Virtual campaigning has its pros and cons:
you can connect to more voters, quicker. But it’s easier for voters to ignore you. I certainly had a fair share of expletives and abuse thrown my way. And through those hundreds and hundreds of calls, you only have 15 or so meaningful, persuasive conversations. Though in that allimportant state of Florida, 15 votes really do make the difference. My real highlights (apart from Zoom calls with President Obama, Kamala Harris and Cher!) came from voters’ responses. You leave the campaign thinking you’ve heard it all. From those convinced a British guy must be a Russian spy, to a woman in labour … you can’t make it up. Of course, SCC played a role in all this. Were it not for Mr McKenzie’s top A-level classes, I would never have developed my keen interest for US politics and tried to take this further. US political divisions will take years to heal, but I feel proud to have played a tiny role. It was so easy to get involved – and something I can’t recommend enough to sixth formers and recent leavers. After all, the 2024 race is just around the corner.
Leo Harris C16
