Students a valuable resource in presidential campaigning

When Texas Rep. Ron Paul announced in May 2011 that he was running for president, Pitt student… When Texas Rep. Ron Paul announced in May 2011 that he was running for president, Pitt student Cliff Maloney hoped Paul’s third time running would be the charm.

Maloney, a junior education major at Pitt’s Johnstown campus, is the Pennsylvania campus coordinator for Youth for Ron Paul. The national organization, which started last September, urges young people such as students to start local chapters in support of Paul’s campaign.

Most of the Republican candidates still in this year’s presidential race announced their candidacies in May or June of last year and began unofficially campaigning before then. President Barack Obama officially declared he would run in April of last year, although he also began raising funds and campaigning well before then. As the candidates kicked off their presidential bids, Pitt students and recent graduates looked to join the political arena to serve as a valuable resource in capturing youth votes.

Maloney, who began volunteering with the organization last fall, said that as of last Wednesday, the organization had opened about 25 chapters nationwide toward its 100-chapter goal. He said the individual chapters use methods such as canvassing, tabling and phone calls to inform the public of Paul’s message.

“Numbers is the big thing. You want to have numbers,” Maloney said, though he declined to go into further detail about the methods the campaign would employ, saying he could not speak officially for Paul’s campaign.

Casey Rankin, president of Pitt College Republicans, said the club will not begin campaigning for a particular candidate until the party officially announces a nominee. He expects this announcement will come within the next few months.

The club will encourage its members to volunteer with the Republican campaign office in Allegheny County, canvassing and working at the office’s phone bank. Rankin said the club’s efforts to reach voters will be especially strong between September and November.

“Most people tune in to the elections and start paying attention after Labor Day,” Rankin said, adding that the club’s members would be encouraged to put in extra efforts during that time.

Lara Sullivan, the president of Pitt College Democrats, is also the regional director of Students for Barack Obama, a nationwide campus organization that began during his 2008 campaign. Obama’s campaign reorganized the group last June.

Though Sullivan anticipates her club will help Obama’s campaign by making phone calls and going door-to-door in the coming months and during the fall, so far its efforts have focused on voter registration. She estimated that the club registered about 100 new voters last fall.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who recently dropped out of the race, began raising funds for his campaign in May 2011, formally announcing his candidacy in June. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann both formally announced their candidacies in June, though Bachmann has since dropped out of the race. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney formed an exploratory committee for his campaign the same month and formally began running at the beginning of June.

In recent decades, U.S. presidential candidates’ campaigns have begun earlier in the election cycle. In the 1980s and 1990s, candidates for the presidential primaries did not typically announce they were campaigning until close to the end of the year prior to the elections.

By November 2012, when the nation chooses its next president, the race for the presidency will have lasted more than a year and a half.

Jennifer Victor, a Pitt assistant professor of political science, speculated that technology might explain why the timing of campaigns has shifted.

Around-the-clock news coverage and the Internet makes information increasingly available to voters. Therefore, scandals and other negative information that causes candidates to drop out of the race, as well as previous policy decisions which certain voters find unfavorable, emerge earlier in the race and reach a wider audience.

“In a number of years, by the Super Tuesday mark, which is in February or March, we know who the nominee is going to be,” Victor said.

Super Tuesday, set for March 6 this year, is the day during an election cycle when the greatest number of states will hold primaries. Because so many voters choose a candidate that day, it is generally regarded as a decisive point in the campaign.

Pennsylvania will hold its 2012 Republican primaries April 24, nearly a year after many of the candidates began their campaigns.

But Victor said she believes voters will make up their minds before then, and so prospective candidates have to get exposure earlier in the race. This, Victor said, means that during each election cycle, candidates begin seeking media attention earlier.

Victor described the 2008 Democratic primaries, when it did not become clear until early June whether Obama or Hillary Clinton would be the party’s nominee.

During the same primary season, the Republican party announced Arizona Sen. John McCain as its nominee in March, well before the conclusion of the primaries. Victor said that it is much more typical to see the primaries decided by March or April.

Matthew DiFiore, who graduated from Pitt last December with a degree in history and political science, remembers working on the 2008 Obama campaign. From the end of August until election day in early November, he was a field intern for the campaign’s office in Oakland, which he said aimed primarily at getting the support of Pitt and Carnegie Mellon students.

Although he performed several tasks including canvassing and calling registered voters to persuade them to vote for Obama, he said the campaign on campus aimed mainly to register students to vote, since students tend to vote for Democratic candidates.

DiFiore and other field interns would set up tables on campus where students could register themselves.

“We also did what we called ‘dorm storming,’ which was several students who were interns going into a dorm and asking anyone who answered if they were registered to vote,” DiFiore said.

He saw the biggest push to register students to vote at the end of September and in early October, immediately prior to the deadline for sending in registration forms to vote in the 2008 general election.