Campaign-In-A-Day Student Profile: Isaac

In 2016 American Majority held our first Campaign-In-A-Day event in July in Ohio with 70 students. Join us in 2021. We have now trained over 2,000 students and adults through the Campaign-In-A-Day program. This profile series of blog posts are to highlight this summer’s attendees’ experiences with the event.

 

Name: Isaac

Where are you from: Minneapolis, MN

School or Occupation: Junior at Patrick Henry College, majoring in Government

Campaign-In-A-Day Attended: Forge 2021

 

[During Campaign-In-A-Day] I was exposed to the strategy and decision making in campaigning. They led me through questions like: How do you make decisions when your candidate is invited to multiple events at the same time? I understand now that you need some type of metric to make that decision, and that is often rooted in your larger strategy. Another question I had to answer was, how must a campaign change as the election approaches? You have to think hard about the best decisions given your resources and information.

From a practical perspective, there are no perfect candidates, but everyone has their strengths, and how you prepare your candidate to communicate really matters. We decided to build our campaign and messaging around the strengths of our candidate, and we spent a lot of time coaching them to succeed in this area. One of the students on my team was a Communications major. She did a fantastic job helping our candidate form clear messaging and practicing to improve candidate speeches. She also helped all the members of our team prepare to field difficult questions about their campaign roles from the panel of judges. When it came time for our team to present, they knocked it out of the park.

Campaign-In-A-Day is useful for people in politics because it prepares you for what is real.

I have worked in state politics, and many of the scenarios and personalities we encountered in the campaign were well within the realm of plausibility. CIAD trains for the thought processes necessary to win elections with real candidates in real scenarios.

Two of the most important strengths I used during CIAD were teamwork and leadership. You must work together to succeed with your teammates, but there were times when I needed to lead and make final decisions  so we could all move forward. I was the campaign manager during the Campaign-In-A-Day exercise. My role was to cast a vision for our team as we entered the race, and then form a plan to win the election with our candidate and with our  resources. Over the course of the campaign, I was able to divide up our team to tackle everything we had to accomplish.

My advice for future attendees is to go all in! This is a fantastic exercise. The most important advice I have is to involve your entire team. You will deal with more issues and scenarios than you could face by yourself within the allotted time. Work to include and engage everyone. When you come before a panel of judges quizzing you about your campaign decisions your whole team will need to cross the finish line together. .