Campaigning
at full force for elections
By Amy Cucinella
On-line Forty-Niner
 Candidates
campaigning for elected positions in Associated
Students Inc. at Cal State Long Beach were
out in full force yesterday and will be
through Thursday when voting ends.
The
myriad of posters that have blanketed the
flowerbeds on campus for the past three
weeks is one of the most popular methods
of campaigning.
“Posters
are a good way to get your name out there
and get your faces out there,” said Sarah
Wilkins, a senior biology major who was
an A.S. senator last fall.
Posters
are useful at achieving name recognition,
which is important because students will
often just vote off of that, said John Kitahara,
a sophomore electrical engineering major
who is running for senator for the College
of Engineering and is currently A.S.I.’s
special events commissioner.
Posters
are not all it takes, however. Receiving
endorsement by the student organizations
and attending college council meetings are
also essential, Kitahara said.
“It’s
better to convince someone to vote for you
person-to-person than it is with a poster,”
Kitahara said.
Other
campaigning strategies include candidates
handing out flyers and standing near voting
polls, in business attire, asking students
to vote for them.
“Standing
by the tables in your suit won’t be enough
to win if that’s all you do but I do think
it is helpful,” Kitahara said. “Like for
people who are just going to vote it might
give emphasis. But candidates have to sell
themselves before voting day.”
Not
every candidate this year is following these
campaigning rituals, however. Casimir Blonski,
a junior electrical engineering major running
for treasurer, and Mike Landis, a junior
computer science major running for vice
president, are organizing a campaign unique
to the campus.
“We’re
not really trying to win is the thing,”
Blonski said. “Our campaign is based completely
on not liking the way student government
works here. It’s basically a popularity
contest, but now it has a bigger budget.”
Blonski
and Landis created posters unlike any others
on campus in that their content is irrelevant
to the positions for which they are running.
All the posters have a “Mike loves/Casimir
hates” theme such as the “Mike loves kittens”
showing a fluffy kitten next to a “Casimir
hates kittens” showing a disheveled kitten
laying in a mess of cat food.
Several
students have commented to the two that
they appreciate the humor, and many of the
compliments have come from other candidates,
Landis said.
“I
wouldn’t even go as far as to call this
a campaigning strategy because we don’t
have any intent to win,” Landis said. “We
sat at Meet and Greet with two sheets of
torn-out spiral notepaper with arrows drawn
on the paper pointing at each other and
saying ‘Vote Mike’ and ‘Vote Casimir.’ We
were passive. People laughed at us but immediately
lost their smiles when other candidates
would bother them. We’re trying not to annoy
people.”
Blonski
said he has, in the past, been one of the
many annoyed students with the way candidates
campaign and decided to make a point of
this through his campaign.
“Being
a student who usually doesn’t vote, we were
sick of it last year and decided to make
a campaign based on nothing,” Blonski said.
“When
you harass people, it turns them off,” Wilkins
said acknowledging the overzealous behavior
of candidates. “Students don’t really vote
for candidates based on issues, they vote
for their friends.”
Landis
offered his own theory regarding why students
vote for who they do.
“Most
of them go by the cutest face on the posters,”
Landis said. “That’s what I’d go by — if
I voted.”
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