COUNTERPOINT Magazine | Grassroots 101

The temperature was hovering around freezing as the rain fell harder by the minute, but Maya Dolgin and Caroline Phillips had reason to be upbeat. The two Wellesley College sophomores had reached a climactic day in their months of campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Bundled up in their full-length parkas, they stood in front of the Hunnewell Elementary School in Wellesley holding signs in support of Clinton as the polls opened at 7 a.m. on Super Tuesday. Even when a bespectacled middle-aged woman asked them to stand across the street--150 feet from the polling place--so as not to "offend" anyone, they obliged without complaint.

"Ask her how much she slept last night," Phillips said. Despite only getting four hours of sleep the night before, Dolgin, the campaign manager of Wellesley Students for Hillary, replied, "I feel pretty pumped actually." While Dolgin recognized that "what I'm doing here in Wellesley is not affecting what's happening in Orange County, California," she was ready to make a difference in whatever way she could.

Dolgin and Phillips were not the only students out in the rain that day; later that morning, a few members of Wellesley's Students for Barack Obama (SFBO) chapter would also head to the Hunnewell School and the Bates Elementary School to hold signs for "visibility." In an election in which the candidates seem to be reaching out to young voters more than ever before, Wellesley students have responded by getting involved in the campaigns themselves. The Wellesley chapters of Students for Hillary and Students for Barack Obama have been functioning as subcommittees of the College Democrats this year. While the initial plan had been for SFBO and Students for Hillary to combine forces after Super Tuesday, the groups continued to campaign separately, according to Democrats Co-President Ona Keller WC '08, since a clear nominee did not emerge. The College Republicans have not actively been campaigning for any one candidate because of the small size of the group (approximately 15 regular members) and a reluctance to alienate its members by supporting one candidate, according to president Jennifer Carne WC '08. Students for Hillary and SFBO, however, have attracted a strong membership. Dolgin estimated that about 30 students attend the group's meetings; 80 to 100 turn out for social events; and over 200 subscribe to the online conference on FirstClass. SFBO has about ten students who actively participate in canvassing trips and phonebanking, according to Aubre Carreón Aguilar WC'08 and Mariel Dela Cruz WC'08, two of the group's three founders.

In the week leading up to Super Tuesday's primaries, both groups sponsored a variety of programming. Every day at lunchtime, Students for Hillary held bring-your-own-cell-phone phonebanking sessions in the Pendleton Well in the academic quad to make calls on behalf of Clinton. They sponsored a talk with Barbara Lee, founder of the eponymous foundation that supports women in politics, and another with Massachusetts state senators who endorse Clinton. SFBO also phonebanked and sponsored their own discussion, "Empowered Women Called to Change," with Betsy Myers, the Chief Operating Officer of the Obama campaign, and Robin Leeds, an adviser to Obama on women's issues, which drew an audience of approximately 90 on a Friday afternoon, according to Carreón Aguilar.

That students are so interested in the campaign is not surprising; before every election in recent memory, it seems, media outlets and political pundits have anticipated a dramatic increase in the voter turnout among the 18- to 29-year-old demographic. In the 2000 presidential election, 36.1 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds eligible to vote did so, and in 2004 that number rose to 46.7 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. So far this year, the numbers have already begun to rise during the primaries. On Super Tuesday, the number of young voters participating in the primaries quadrupled in Tennessee; tripled in Georgia, Missouri and Oklahoma; and doubled in Massachusetts compared to 2000 figures, according to an analysis by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Emily Kirby, a CIRCLE researcher, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that presidential candidates first began hiring campaign staff to fill the specific role of capturing the youth vote in 2004 ("The Student Vote May Have Played a Key Role on Super Tuesday," 2/8/08).

This year, Clinton's and Obama's campaigns, in particular, have tried to include young voters among those they are reaching out to: Clinton launched Hillblazers, an arm of the campaign to target young voters, when she spoke at Wellesley College in the fall. Then actresses Amber Tamblyn and America Ferrera stepped up to serve as its the national co-chairs. Students for Barack Obama began in response to a Facebook petition for Obama to run for president, according to his campaign website. In contrast to the Democratic candidates', the websites of John McCain and Mike Huckabee do not promote an organized part of the campaign devoted to young supporters.

That's not to say that there are no college students campaigning for the Republicans. Until Mitt Romney's suspension of his campaign, Wellesley junior Jennifer Huddleston was part of the National Committee of Students for Mitt Romney. Huddleston, who is the Wellesley College Republicans' Senator to College Government, first got involved one year ago by participating in conference calls discussing ways to get Romney's message out to young voters. She, too, did phonebanking and helped organize "primary parties" for young voters in New Hampshire and Iowa, but did not attend any of the campaign events in person. This was not her first time getting involved in politics: Huddleston has taken part in campaigns in her home state of Alabama and also worked for Kerry Healey's campaign for Massachusetts governor in 2006. Last year she was Central Regional Vice Chair for the Massachusetts Alliance of College Republicans. "A lot of Republicans are not viewed as a party that cares about youth," she said, so it is important to make sure that demographic does not feel "ignored" during the campaigns.

Far from being ignored, some Wellesley students have been actively campaigning since last spring, and their motivations range from the circumstantial to those built on childhood memories. Phillips, for example, became a Clinton supporter through the encouragement of Dolgin, her friend, after attending lunchtime discussions sponsored by Students for Hillary last spring. Kristin Ruben WC '10 grew up outside Washington, D.C., and used to tell her mother that she wanted to be the first woman president. Her mother, she said, would laugh and tell her that Hillary Clinton might be her to it, and now Ruben is doing what she can to make that happen. She has worked at the Portsmouth, N.H., field office and at the campaign's national headquarters, fulfilling the roles that seem to be on the tip of each campaigner's tongue: voter outreach, door-to-door canvassing, visibility (that is, holding campaign signs) and phonebanking. It is the small accomplishments that mean a lot to her: "Whenever you call people and actually persuade them to vote for Hillary, it's really gratifying," she said during a Students for Hillary phonebanking session, just a week before Super Tuesday.

The phonebanking process for Clinton's campaign is relatively simple: volunteers dial into a network that automatically calls numbers generated from a computer system, and at the end of each call, the volunteer keys in a number to indicate the respondent's attitude towards Clinton (e.g., plans to vote for her, is undecided, is a Republican) before being connected to another caller. The day after I spoke with Ruben, Margaret Weirich WC '08 was in Pendleton with the group, eating some of the Thai food they provided in between phone calls. Weirich had a short script produced by the campaign in front of her but did not rely solely on it and sometimes tried to talk with people about the issues if they disagreed with Clinton's stance. A political science major, Weirich has been involved with Students for Hillary all year and credits her interest in political participation to her home state of Iowa. She said she was disappointed she could not be home during the lead-up to the caucus but was eager to do her part by participating in the caucus itself. "Young people really came out in Iowa [at the caucus], which was really exciting," Weirich said, particularly in her precinct near the University of Iowa.

While making phone calls may seem like a small gesture, those efforts add up. The day before the Massachusetts primary, 300 people made 50,000 calls in two hours from the Boston campaign headquarters, according to Dolgin. Rachel Harvey WC '10 appreciates the bigger picture in which she plays a part: "I think it's important to be part of something bigger than yourself sometimes," she said. Harvey interned in the finance department of the Boston office last semester and is the newsletter editor for Students for Hillary. She, like Ruben, has admired Clinton since her First Lady years. "I've always loved Hillary," Harvey said. Having grown up during the Clintons' time in the White House, Harvey now says of Senator Clinton, "She really is a great voice for our generation."

The founders of Wellesley's chapter of Students for Barack Obama--seniors Emily Buss, Mariel Dela Cruz and Aubre Carreón Aguilar--match Clinton's supporters in their enthusiasm for their candidate. Buss, an Illinois native, has known about Obama since 2003 and met him several times in his capacity as a senator. Enamored with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Candidate, Buss said, "I may never be so inspired by any other candidate again." She put her enthusiasm to good use by traveling to the local field office in Iowa for four days before the caucus for canvassing and visibility. She was not the only young voter giving up some of her holiday break in support of the senator: three other college students traveled with her, and there were also high school students interning at the field office, she said.

While Buss was in Iowa, her friend (and mine, in the interest of full disclosure) Katie Robart WC '08, who studies psychology and economics at Wellesley, campaigned in her home state of New Hampshire. Although she has not previously been politically active, getting involved, she said, was "the responsible thing to do." For the two weeks leading up to the primary, Robart interned from the early hours of the morning until around midnight each day. On New Year's Eve, she had four hours off, and she was back to work by 9 a.m. the next day.

Dela Cruz tried to explain the involvement of young people in the campaigning process this year. "Appointing some place in the campaign for us [as the Obama campaign has done with its national organization of Students for Barack Obama] gives students a sense of legitimacy" and increases their "motivation" to participate. In the week leading up to the Massachusetts primary, Dela Cruz had only one thing on her mind: "Right now we live for Tuesday," she said. Her single-minded focus on campaigning reflected her identification of Obama with the quintessentially American belief in the importance of hard work. Having immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines with her family when she was 12, Dela Cruz said, "The belief that you can [succeed] through hard work means a lot." A political science major, Dela Cruz took a course in political organizing and two years ago interned for Deval Patrick's campaign to become governor of Massachusetts. She connected her own campaigning efforts--which have included canvassing trips to New Hampshire in the fall--to this belief and to her own background as a self-described "political organizer" when she said, "Every time I hear Senator Obama speak, I am reminded why I'm a political science major...It's that belief in this American system, that it works...If we invest our time in it, we can really make a difference."

Carreón Aguilar is also invested in Obama's campaign because of her belief in the ability of grassroots efforts to accomplish something important. "All of my being wants him to win," she said on the evening of Super Tuesday, while following the results of the primaries online during the on-campus party sponsored by the Committee for Political and Legislative Action (CPLA). She attributed the appropriateness of grassroots campaigning to Obama's beliefs that "we are one people and we are one nation. We have to take care of one another." "It takes all of us together to get something done," she said, as her peers in SFBO came by periodically to look at the results she had pulled up on her laptop.

At the CPLA party, which CPLA Chair Rose-Ellen El Khoury WC '09 estimated drew about 500 people in the first hour and a half, a sense of camaraderie among fellow campaigners was evident. When CNN called Massachusetts for Clinton, Katie Chanpong WC '10 of Students for Hillary came running down the stairs into the Atrium while a peer followed with a near-life-sized cardboard cutout of Clinton. She began to cheer, as the cameraman from local ABC affiliate WCVB trailed her: "When I say president, you say Hillary!" She ran up to Dolgin and began high-fiving her and counting the victories so far. "New Jersey: ours! Massachusetts: ours!"

The election, of course, will not be won on enthusiasm alone, but if Wellesley's student campaigners are any indication, it seems that the hard work accompanying that enthusiasm will go a long way to bring the youth voters to national attention.

Kara Hadge WC '08 (khadge[at]wellesley[dot]edu) appreciates when radio stations play appropriate music on rainy days.

February 2008
Volume 31/Issue 5

Grassroots 101

College students campaign for change

{by kara hadge wc '08}

February 2008Volume 31/Issue 5

Grassroots 101

College students campaign for change

{by kara hadge wc '08}

February 2008
Volume 31/Issue 5