This Week
This week, we shift from political parties to elections.
What kind of person runs for political office, and how do they actually win? One of the toughest things for students to truly understand about elections is that real, regular people just like us run for office. That’s what makes our representative democracy work. Few people wake up one morning and decide they can be President. Most public officials start as an elected member of a civic club board or a Rotary Club – maybe deciding to run for a truly public office as the trustee of a school district or community collage board of trustees.
Running for office successfully is an inexact science. A lot of your success or failure depends on factors beyond your control. Like any other important project, though, there are things that successful political campaigns usually have in common. Successful campaigns understand how many voters they need, where they’re likely to find them and what issues will interest them. Successful campaigns – especially for local races – depend on lots of personal contact between the candidate and potential voters. Successful campaigns understand the role of money – how to raise it and how to spend it.
Your assignment this week is one that frustrates many of my students, because you can’t just absorb information from the book or from a website and regenerate it in an essay. That’s one of the reasons I like it so much. Though your textbook chapter focuses on national elections, your job this week is to design a winning campaign for one of two actual candidates running for state representative in next week’s election. If you were running their campaign, what would you do?
Yes, I realize you don’t know how to do this. Ask anybody who has ever run for public office – they’ll tell you they didn’t know how to do it either the first time they ran. Somehow, some of them manage to win anyway. Think creatively. Speculate about what might work. Know that while there are certainly some wrong answers, there are no certain right answers about how best to design a campaign for the state legislature. As I mention in the assignment directions, if I asked five campaign professionals to do this assignment, I’d get five totally different campaigns (and they’d charge me a lot of money)
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