City elections spark campus activism

With November fast approaching, campus political groups are focusing efforts on the hotly debated—if not highly contested—New York City elections.

Front and center is the New York City mayoral race. Since term limits were extended from eight years to 12 last year by the New York City Council as current Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his bid to run for a third term in 2009, this year’s election is anything but ordinary.

Bloomberg, a political independent elected twice as a Republican, faces Democratic and Working Families Party candidate Bill Thompson—currently the city comptroller. Third-party candidates include Libertarian Joseph Dobrian, the Socialist Workers Party’s Dan Fein, the Green Party’s Rev. Billy Talen, the Conservative Party’s Stephen Christopher, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Frances Villar.

The central focus of the Columbia University College Democrats this election is its annual campaign trip­—this year, 40 students will go canvassing in Virginia. But back in New York, they will also offer students not traveling to Virginia the opportunity to work on Bill Thompson’s campaign.

Members have been working uptown with Democratic candidates for City Council and other local offices, with some students who are “active in the city races, working in political offices—especially for Bill Thompson—both as interns and as volunteers,” said CU Democrats Vice President Avi Edelman, CC’11. The club started e-mail and Facebook campaigns to encourage voter registration and, although it will not host any on-campus events during Election Day break, members are distributing information about Democratic candidates in the hope of getting out the vote.

The CU College Republicans are also distributing information, although they will not be organizing any large events around the election. “We can’t endorse any party or campaign as a group, according to university policy,” said CU Republicans Executive Director Chuck Roberts, CC’12, “but many campaigns in New York City and even the tri-state area have been reaching out to us, so we distribute that information.” Much of this information comes from candidates for city council or mayoral office, including the Bloomberg campaign.

Roberts said that the club has a lot of members from New York and New Jersey who are registered in their home districts, so many may vote in the city’s elections. Representatives from local campaigns have asked if they could come speak to CU Republicans members during club meetings, which Roberts said was a possibility.

“I’m sure that the election will figure prominently in our general body meetings before and after the election,” he said.

Columbia Political Union General Manager Sajaa Ahmed, CC’10, said that her group would not be doing much for the city elections, since the group has set its focus on health care discussion panels. Since few CPU members are registered to vote in New York, “we felt that we would rather focus on creating discussion among our members about general election issues than on pushing voter registration and efforts particular to New York City, since many people are already registered in their home states,” Ahmed explained.

The CPU does make announcements in e-mails and during general body meetings for the citywide elections and encourages elligible New York voters to head to the polls. There had been an effort to put together a panel of city candidates, but “we got back to school in September and by then the candidates were already fully in campaign mode and already had their schedules,” Ahmed said.

“We could only get representatives from the candidates’ campaigns and Bloomberg could not come to speak on campus.”

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