ASUO presidential and vice presidential candidates Andy Dolberg and Ben Hartley, running on a promise to work for free while decreasing the incidental fee by 10 percent in a year, received only 187 votes last week in the primary election. Front-runners Jared Axelrod and Juliana Guzman pulled in 1,035 votes. Dolberg and Hartley spent just $8.89. Axelrod and Guzman spent $1,542.12.
Does the victory for student government president and vice president depend on which candidates spend the most money campaigning?
Despite what some people may guess, records of campaign contributions and expenditures show that spending more money doesn’t necessarily mean a win.
Jacob Daniels and Amy DuFour spent more than $2,600, the most of any campaign, during their bid for student government president and vice president, and they were still short the 212 votes needed to make it to this week’s general election. Executive candidates Dallas Brown and Emily McLain spent just $87 less than Todd Mann and Jontea Grace, but garnered 363 fewer votes than the Mann-Grace ticket.
Campaign expenditures may not necessarily transform into votes, but Axelrod and Guzman did spend more than Mann and Grace, who received the second highest amount of votes. The Axelrod-Guzman ticket spent $1.49 for each vote received.
Mann and Grace spent $464.69 less and pulled in 78 fewer votes than Axelrod and Guzman. They spent $1.23 for each vote received.
Last year, current ASUO President Adam Walsh and Vice President Kyla Coy’s campaign cost $579 less than their opponents’ campaign, yet they took the general election by 317 votes. Walsh and Coy’s competition, Ashley Rees and Jael Anker-Lagos, spent $1,305 compared to Walsh and Coy’s $726.
For Executive candidates, the largest expenditures have been for T-shirts. This year Axelrod and Mann spent an average of $656 for shirts. Adding in Daniels and DuFour’s $1,664 for 300 shirts, in various sizes, and the average amount a campaign spends on shirts climbs to $992.
The majority of contribution budgets for all tickets were made up of donations from family members and the candidates themselves. The largest student donation for the Axelrod-Guzman ticket was $50 from their campaign manager, Ashley Rees. The largest student donation for the Mann-Grace ticket was $200 from ASUO Multicultural Advocate Ty Schwoeffermann.
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