New politics professor Chanley Rainey has found a way to better involve college students in local elections while also educating the wider electorate.
Rainey’s Campaigns and Elections class has put together a Nonpartisan Guide to Local Elections for the Golden Triangle area. The guide includes candidates for the Mississippi State Supreme Court and District 1 U.S. House of Representatives races, giving a brief overview of each candidate’s platform and experience.
It’s Rainey’s first year of teaching outside graduate school, and her class has only three students. But she and her students have spent the semester researching and reaching out to candidates to find out more about their stances on the issues.
“I wanted them to do some engagement with politics as it relates to the world they’re actually living in,” Rainey said. “The presidential election everybody knows about. We can talk about that without them having to engage in research in class.”
Instead, she wanted the students’ research to focus on less well-known candidates and races.
It’s a way to interact with and help the community, too, Rainey added.
“I feel like anyone who has been in a voting booth has experienced the phenomenon of looking down the ballot and realizing that they didn’t know all the races that were going to be on their ballot and didn’t know all the names that were going to be on the ballot,” she said. “So I thought it was a really good service and really good way to do something they were going to have to do for the class anyway.”
Rainey assigned herself and each student two candidates — one for the Supreme Court and one for the House of Representatives. Students began researching the candidates’ platforms and contacting their campaigns for phone interviews.
It was immediately clear it would take more time than they had thought.
“It took a while,” said junior Subrina Oswalt of West Point, who was in charge of contacting incumbent Dist 1 Rep. Trent Kelly. “We all just did background research to find out who they are and where they’re from and then it took a while for us to get their contact information, get in contact with their team and tell them what we were doing.”
“Sometimes you have to go through two or three people,” she added.
It was particularly hard to contact the unknown, first-time candidates, Rainey added, of which there were several. Talking to those candidates inspired the students. A couple of the candidates, like Democratic U.S. House candidate Jacob Owens, are only two or three years older than the students.
“I thought they were brave,” said senior Toya McQueen of Columbus, who was in charge of reaching out to Owens, as well as Lowndes County Circuit Court Judge Jim Kitchens who is running for the Supreme Court.
“I hear a lot of people say millennials or the younger generations don’t know anything about politics and don’t want to deal with that,” she added. “And it’s interesting to see a millennial that’s interested in politics enough to actually say ‘I’m going to run.'”
Class member Matthew Hijazeen, a sophomore from Millport, Alabama, said he thinks they may be taking inspiration from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — in terms of being outsiders running for office, he added quickly, not in terms of policy.
Oswalt said she hopes to provide vital information to voters.
McQueen agreed.
“Knowledge is power, and voting is a power that we as citizens can use,” she said. “So when you put those two together, now that you’ve got your … knowledge about who you are voting for, that is definitely a great thing to have.”
The Dispatch will run the students’ guide in the Sunday edition of the paper.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
