As early voting stations closed, news polls were published and the nation tuned in to the most decisive hours in the next four years, the atmosphere of Oakland University’s party chapters grew nuanced.
“Election week can’t go by fast enough,” Brendan DeVore, treasurer of the College Democrats of Oakland University (CDOU), said.
With OU’s College Republicans having a quieter campus presence during election season, CDOU shared their tiring eagerness for the presidential race as a campus chapter of a political party.
“People who aren’t even in political organizations right now are very fed up,” Rose Smith, CDOU president, said. “But just the people in politics, we’re all tired — especially with me acting as the representative for OU — within college dems all across the state there’s a realm of pessimism.”
Lack of leadership engagement and an overt attitude of desperation for party volunteers adds to the exhaustion college chapters have developed, Smith explained.
“I will attribute a lot of that to the Democratic Party in and of itself,” Smith said. “Hearing a lot from the Democratic Party and being involved in it, there’s a certain aspect that the Democratic Party has noticed where they suck at maintaining a lead.”
“One thing I constantly notice in the emails is there’s always like a sense of urgency like, ‘You need to donate because we’re behind, we’re behind, we’re behind,’ when I personally don’t think we’re behind,” Jack Waters, CDOU secretary, said. “I still think that I have a sense of optimism.”
“What they’ll do is they’ll perform an internal poll that says they’re doing badly to get more volunteers and get more people involved. But it’s almost entirely faux,” Waters said.
While the University of Michigan and Michigan State University — which is one of the largest chapters in the country, Smith explained — have enough traction to travel up north to volunteer as canvassers, OU is “kind of like a community college, in way that almost all the students are working, full-time and part-time jobs, and like everyone’s super busy. We’re not a very good volunteer school.”
The CDOU E-Board mentioned that the lack of the chapter’s off-campus participation has been criticized by other partisans. Nonetheless, OU members maintain optimism through their continual support of their party, whether it is through funding or campus engagement.
“I will say the election season, of course, does help our membership, it helps our events. It helps everything,” Smith said. “We just have more people, because more people are engaged, more people are involved. So, we are certainly expecting a dip off after the election.”
Debate watch parties have been bipartisan efforts between CDOU and College Republicans as well as other political campus organizations to engage with each other’s membership and maintain communication between the party chapters.
“The primary goal of the chapter that I have created is to build a community,” Smith said. “Of course, we have leftists and liberal ideologies around that community, but it’s to build a community to have friends.”
The last event of the election season is the election night watch party — with no scheduled ending time — where campus political organizations will be watching televised election results at the habitat on Nov. 5.
“When the time comes to promote the candidates and to get the vote out for the candidates, we want to support we will,” Smith said. “Until the next midterms, until the 2025 off-year elections we’re just kind of hanging out.”
