Live from the Nuke Free Zone

The folks behind
Operation
Red Scare at Santa Rosa Junior College in my own Sonoma County,
California (see our coverage of the incident) recently ran for student government.
Elections were held at the end of last week, and results were completed and posted this morning.

In short, the College Republicans lost. Running on the New Progressives
ticket, they got about a third of the votes in general while the incumbent
Students for Students slate got about two thirds. Keep reading for details and commentary below the cut.

In case you couldn’t tell from the link to the previous story,
I don’t like the New Progressives and I even picked up half a stack
of Students for Students leaflets and passed them around, so that’s where
I stand personally.

The total number of votes was only 630 out of about
36,000
students, a mere 1.66% voter turnout. The election was not very well
promoted versus any other school event, getting its biggest boost from
the school newspaper devoting much of an issue to it two days before voting
started. I didn’t see any signs go up until the first morning of elections.
However, polling was held for two days in the most heavily trafficed area
of campus. Thousands of people must have walked by and at least noticed
that something was going on.

To someone who has been paying attention to the goings-on behind
the scenes, this was more important than your average school election.
The stakes here were whether Santa Rosa Junior College might issue
a statement in support of David Horowitz’s “Academic Freedom” initiative,
soon to be introduced in California’s Legislature. Horowitz’s plan is
to remove all “liberal” professors from their jobs by drowning them
in frivolous lawsuits for such “bias” as failing to give preferential
treatment to creationism in biology and geology classes, where “liberal”
is anything which happens to annoy the people who call themselves
“conservatives” these days. The theory is that the high ratio of liberal
professors to conservatives is not caused by the economics of
socially-interested liberals finding more value in contributing to
their society than self-interested conservatives, but can only be the result
of a Vast Liberal Conspiracy. Of course, no evidence is presented that this
is the case. It is just assumed that once the evil conniving liberals
are removed from their positions of power, the masses of qualified
conservatives willing to take a deep cut from their private-sector salaries
for a longer work week would rush forward to fill the void. This is all
promoted in the name of diversity and the search for truth.

In the biggest matchup, SRJC Republicans head Molly McPherson lost
the race for Student Senate President 426-177 to Kory White, who was
derided in the school newspaper as a brain-damaged embezzling thief.
While I don’t know how much of that is true, it wasn’t enough to matter
to enough of that miniscule percentage of people who happened to vote.
McPherson wasn’t even the strongest New Progressive candidate, that
honour going to Mattew Nittenger, who lost the race for the student
member of the Board of Trustees to Richard Florentino, 382-189.
The third contested race held the widest margin victory, with Angela
Medina defeating the New Progressives’ Jonathan Patton 447-122.

However, the New Progressives did eke out a technical victory in
the race for Senators at Large, where the number of candidates running
was so small that all candidates were accepted. The largest vote-getter
was Students for Students’s Jude Rowe with 408, followed by independent
candidates Leah Conde with 197 and Steven Fajardin with 188, and finally
the New Progressives’s Wayne Ritchie with 178 and Massood Nusratty
with 171.

While this looks at first like a blowaway rejection of the Republicans’
agenda, I’d warn their enemies (anyone who is not a Republican) against
throwing a party too soon. The Republicans club boasts only about 75
members on campus, but they were able to poll twice and half that
number in an election. The low Independent tallies seem to show that this
election was not a vote against the Republicans as much as it was one for
the Students for Students slate. For that, I credit the Students for Students campaign materials.

Neither party openly admitted the greater stakes. The New Progressives
ran a Schwarzenegger-inspired campaign for change for its own sake, also
declaring that without them, students would have no voice in the government.
However, the New Progressives’ poster was a shoddy pasted-together job
that fell apart in the wind, and they had no personal promotion that I saw.
Students for Students had a professional-looking banner coloured the
same green as the leaflets their supporters were handing out, which
bore the simple phrase “Vote for the S” on one side and on the other
exalted the group’s goals and record. The only reference to the Red Star incident was the slogan “Vote for Integrity” on the banner, which also wisely noted that the Students for Students were endorsed by the SRJC Progressives Club. Students for Students also appeared to have run an underground campaign, as I saw a friend of mine who I did not know as having an interest in college politics campaigining for the party.

If the New Progressives would have had a better banner
and had people handing out leaflets the way the Students for Students did,
they would have surely done better, though I can’t say that they would
have won. The number of voters was so small that a serious, weeks-long
public campaign by either side would have probably won them as many votes again as the entire number of ballots in this contest. As it was, it was like choosing between two third parties.