Amelie Rousseau will be the next ASUO president, but she will work with a legislative branch composed primarily of those who opposed her during the campaign.
Rousseau and her running mate, Maneesh Arora, finished 330 votes ahead of opponents Alex McCafferty and Alden Williams in voting for the presidential and vice presidential positions, but all the other races on the ballot went the way of McCafferty’s Reality Check slate.
The Campus Change Coalition, a group of candidates who endorsed Rousseau after their own presidential candidate, Jairo Castaneda, finished third in the primary election, failed to win a single seat for which their candidates ran against ones from Reality Check.
It’s tempting to draw the conclusion that the theme of next year’s ASUO will be conflict between the executive and legislative branches, with Rousseau’s faction controlling the former and McCafferty’s holding most of the positions in the latter.
Rousseau, though, said she didn’t foresee conflict with the Senate.
“Reality Check ran a really great campaign,” she said. “We had good relations with them all through elections. I think it’ll be really great.”
Reality Check campaign manager Jeremy Cabalona called Rousseau and Arora “classy,” and said there would be little conflict between his candidates and her presidency.
“Campus politics go away as soon as (the election) is over,” he said.
But, he emphasized, “We have a whole bunch of candidates. Though they’re on the same slate, it doesn’t mean they can’t think for themselves.”
And there was one issue upon which he maintained Reality Check’s candidates would be intractable: OSPIRG.
“OSPIRG will have no place on this campus next year,” Cabalona said.
The Senate is responsible for determining the amount it will give to contracts like OSPIRG’s. Even on that issue, though, Rousseau said she would respect the wishes of the Senate.
“I think that we’ll have to be realistic in terms of what the final contract will be,” she said. “We will be willing to find funding for OSPIRG. It’s kind of too soon to see.”
Many of Reality Check’s platform points were centered on issues largely controlled by the ASUO executive: creating a staff advocate for students in the fraternity and sorority system, lobbying the University’s athletic department for more student seats at football games and opening up the parking lot at Autzen Stadium for student use.
“Our executive (branch) will prioritize what we’ve talked about in our campaign because those are things the executive has more control over,” Rousseau said.
The election results dealt the biggest defeat to the Campus Change Coalition. The slate’s campaign manager, Zachary Stark-MacMillan, said the slate’s members were disappointed, but optimistic that Rousseau would help them accomplish their goals and find positions for members of the slate. Rousseau said she would attempt to find space for them and their energy in the ASUO.
Assessing the reasons for the coalition’s loss, Stark-MacMillan said, “Looking at the results, it looks like there are about 500 people that just voted for executive and didn’t vote for the Senate seats.”
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