The week’s ASUO primary election ended in victory for the campaigns of Alex McCafferty and Amelie Rousseau, who will contest next week’s general election for president after finishing first and second, respectively, after voting closed Thursday. A ballot measure declaring support for funding the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group through the ASUO also passed in the election.
However, there were defeats for the campaigns of Jairo Castaneda and Cassi Gritzmacher. ASUO Sen. Castaneda’s Campus Change Coalition slate finished second to McCafferty’s Reality Check slate in all races except the presidency, where Castaneda finished third. Former ASUO Marketing Director Gritzmacher finished fourth in the election, and none of her candidates advanced beyond the first round of voting.
Members of the elections board and candidates both declared the election a success, citing a voter turnout of 5,157, larger than usual for ASUO campaigns. Some said it was the highest number ever, though none knew for certain.
Neither Castaneda’s campaign nor Gritzmacher’s had announced a decision on whether to endorse one of the remaining presidential candidates as of press time. Such endorsements may be vital to either candidate, especially Rousseau, who unlike McCafferty ran without a slate of candidates to campaign for her.
Rousseau refused to publicly state whether she expected an endorsement from either Castaneda or Gritzmacher. However, she did receive a phone call she said was from Castaneda during an interview with the Emerald, and was complimentary to his campaign.
“Even though there aren’t any alliances formed, Sen. Castaneda ran a very similar campaign and I think we have similar values and we really want to serve students,” she said.
McCafferty’s campaign manager Jeremy Cabalona, speaking for the Reality Check campaign, also praised both Castaneda and Gritzmacher.
Castaneda said his coalition would meet Thursday night to decide its next move, but that the coalition would definitely be campaigning to support the seven Campus Change Coalition candidates still in the running during the general election.
Gritzmacher said she’d received calls from both Rousseau and McCafferty after the results were announced, and that she had met with McCafferty, but said she hadn’t begun to plan for her campaign’s next move.
“We haven’t really been planning tonight,” she said. “We’ve kind of just been decompressing.”
Gritzmacher said she still valued her campaign’s efforts to run a campaign without many trappings common among campaigns in the student government — specifically the phone banking and with less of the street canvassing, both of which form the basis of many ASUO campaigns.
She encouraged McCafferty and Rousseau to have more extensive conversations with students, which she called “a really authentic and great way to connect with students, and I think a lot of good did come from that.”
She said she had no explanation for the result, and Castaneda also said he was not sure.
He said, however, that Rousseau and McCafferty had advantages his campaign didn’t.
“Maybe it pertains to the Greek houses, maybe money has something to do with it, maybe Amelie and McCafferty just ran a better campaign,” he said.
Casteneda was more ambivalent about Rousseau’s campaign than Rousseau had been about his. He said his coalition had run a grassroots campaign and praised its success in presenting students’ needs, implicitly criticizing the other campaigns.
“Candidates can now see and hear what students want,” he said, “Not just for a resume or because they think parking is important, but because that’s what students want.”
Castaneda contrasted what he saw as the primarily Greek support for Rousseau’s and McCafferty’s campaigns with the support for his own: “It was a grassroots thing. We’re a coalition.”
When asked about the role her volunteers in Greek houses played in her success, Rousseau said, “no comment.”
Cabalona also expressed skepticism about the idea that Greek houses were the difference in the campaign. Choosing his words carefully, he said, “While we would like to thank Greek Life and we have supporters from Greek Life, we feel our platform also appeals to other students.”
There was one other candidate for president, junior Pete Lesiak, who ran a campaign largely based upon what he called “pirate innuendo.” Of McCafferty’s slate, he said, “If they acknowledge campus is wide open to kraken attack, I will endorse them cutlass and rum in hand.”
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