Candidates express difficulty of campaigning on social media for ASB elections

Junior Alex Yang remembers the fun experience of creating his campaign video when he ran for junior vice president last year. He got 30 peers to take part in his video, a rendition of “24K Magic” by Bruno Mars.

With the pandemic limiting student interactions and activities, this year’s experience of running for ASB wasn’t the same, though they did result in another group of students who are excited to try to remake the school’s culture and traditions.

With the conclusion of ASB elections in February, junior Derek Hsu will serve as ASB president next year, Yang will be serving as ASB vice president, sophomore Mason Wang will serve as ASB secretary and sophomore Anand Agarwal as ASB treasurer. Junior Grace Hsu and junior Nandini Desai are next year’s club commissioners.

This year’s ASB elections brought about new challenges due to its lack of in-person opportunities. Candidates experienced difficulty in reaching out to a larger number of students and trying to form a connection with the freshman class, with whom they had never interacted on campus.

Yang said this year’s ASB elections required a lot more personal outreach since he could not talk to a group of people all at once as he had in the past. Instead, he had to reach out to people individually through social media direct messages, often starting off with a quick introduction of himself then asking for their support in his campaign.

In hindsight, Yang said he did pretty well in terms of campaigning and reaching out to a large number of people, although not as many as he would have liked.

Freshman Luke Stratakos found that Wang’s campaign for ASB secretary, which involved reaching out to students through their school emails, “stood out” more than other forms of campaigning.

He mainly received DMs from candidates, which Stratakos believed would have been more effective had they been more tailored to each individual. 

“If they were a little bit more personalized, they would have reached the audience better. It felt like robots were DMing me.”

On the other hand, freshman Shyla Bhandari thought videos were the most effective strategy for campaigning, as they allowed for creativity in presenting candidates’ platforms and experiences.

She had six candidates reach out to her for her support, some of whom made their appeals late in the campaign process. “I think that some of them could have reached out a little earlier to give people more time to think about their decisions,” she said.

Junior Nandini Desai, who ran for ASB treasurer, said it was especially challenging to reach out to the freshmen who she had never talked to or worked with as she did not know what they were looking for in a candidate.

“Right now, there's a huge disconnect in our school, especially with freshmen because they don't really know the culture of our school,” Desai said. “We had to go to more extreme measures to find out all the students in our entire school and know who to reach out to.”

In the end, Desai said she found her interactions with the freshmen to be lacking, and feels that she didn’t connect with many.

Desai also noticed a difference in her usual campaigning strategies in reaching out to students in comparison to the strategies she used this year. In the past, Desai would make a graphic, send messages to people asking them to post her graphic on their social media stories and make posters to hang around school, which she said was most effective. This year, however, Desai created a timeline of her contributions in class office to post on Instagram. 

Although this year’s campaigning was tougher than previous years, the candidates gained important abilities to connect with unfamiliar people.

“My favorite campaign experience has been just being able to reach out and talk with new people,” Yang said. “I’ve talked to a lot of really cool people at our school and I’ve also gotten more comfortable talking with people I don't know.”