The Year of the Underdog?

History indicates that Undergraduate Council insiders hold a fearsome advantage in presidential elections. But the two pairs of outsider candidates in this year’s race say they see widespread discontent with the status quo, and that 2008 might just be the year of the underdog.

Since the establishment in 1996 of a popularly-elected UC president and vice president, the top leaders of the council have always been bred within it. Experience gives insider candidates a list of accomplishments to be touted as well as the baggage of initiatives gone awry. And this year—as every year—the outsiders are banking on the fact that the latter will outweigh the former.

The favorites this time around, current UC Vice President Matthew L. Sundquist ’09 and Finance Committee Chair Randall S. Sarafa ’09, are sitting pretty as the only contenders who have served on the council. Their campaign manager, Maryellen “Mel” C. McGowan ’09, says she expects this season’s contest to be a “slightly more low-key election than in years past” because of the composition of the playing field. It would take “something new and uncharted,” she adds, for an underdog to trounce her team’s bid.

This has left the two outsider tickets as well as some of the electorate wondering if the newcomers will have a chance—or if, like the Sisyphus of Greek myth, the pairs are condemned to an impossible uphill battle.

Both of the outsider presidential candidates, Roy T. Willey IV ’09 and Frances I. Martel ’09, say that their rookie status and original ideas—not jaded or distracted by the inner workings of the UC—will ultimately lead them to victory on a campus allegedly disillusioned by the current council.

“The fact that you see so many outsider tickets is indicative of students looking at the UC and seeing something they don’t really like and want changed,” Martel says.

This week, Sundquist will pay at the ballot box if undergraduates view his year as vice president negatively or if any mistakes he makes on the trail become public. Either circumstance could pave the way for an outsider to grab the UC’s top position.



BOON OR BURDEN

Sundquist and Sarafa’s UC record precedes them as they campaign. But it will only give them a boost if voters recall what they tout as their accomplishments, such as succesfully pushing for an overhaul of the academic calendar, instead of more complicated matters, such as this fall’s dispute over party grants.

According to Kennedy School of Government professor Paul E. Peterson, electorates tend to vote retrospectively, penalizing incumbents if they believe significant mistakes have been made but voting for them if they see signs of progress.

Martel, one of the outsider presidential candidates, puts the chance that voters will view Sundquist’s past negatively at 50 percent. He points to Sundquist’s association with his boss, UC President Ryan A. Petersen ’08, as a possible detriment to the campaign.

“He has Ryan Petersen to bear,” she says of Sundquist. “He could be seen as the accomplice of that guy with the party grant debacle who embarrassed the UC in front of the Faculty, or as this guy so perfectly pristine in his image.”

The Sundquist-Sarafa camp insists that the current vice president’s experience will be viewed in a positive light.

“Matt has a long-existing record, and people can hold him to it,” says McGowan, his campaign manager. “It’s always easy for outsiders to criticize him, but all he needs to do is ask ‘Well, what have you done about it?’ and they’ll have nothing to respond to that question.”

SLIPUP SHAKEUPS

If voters do view the incumbent’s track record as a plus, UC electoral history points to one other route by which an underdog could gain in the polls. In the UC election of fall 2005, the initial insider favorites—John F. Voith ’07 and Tara Gadgil ’07—finished last after a series of faux pas marred their campaign.

A backlash mounted against the initially popular Voith as he was called out for allegedly breaking Election Commission postering regulations, soliciting candidates to collude with him, and flip-flopping before different student clubs about his beliefs on ROTC’s place at Harvard.

According to Voith, those missteps allowed Magnus Grimeland ’07 and running mate Thomas D. Hadfield ’08, neither of whom had served in a leadership position on the UC, to amass support despite their outsider status. They placed second in the race.

“When we made mistakes, the ‘Magnus and Tom’ team positioned themselves as the ‘anti-Voith Gadgil.’ They used our negative publicity to fuel the movement for a UC outsider ticket,” Voith wrote in an e-mail.

But Grimeland, who served as a Mather UC representative, insists it was the sincerity of his message that propelled him past Voith.

“We had people who really believed in us,” he says. “Instead of making it into a political show, people knew we believed in what we were saying.”

Hoping to avoid the slip-ups of the Voith-Gadgil campaign, McGowan says she is keeping the Sundquist campaign “small and focused” with a core staff of 10 to 15 members, and ensuring that all volunteers are familiar with the election’s rules.

This strategy of scaling back to prevent mistakes “would have been great for my campaign,” Voith says. He adds that trouncing a team experienced with UC campaign strategy would be “very difficult.”

Willey, however, is quick to point out that characterizing the Sundquist-Sarafa ticket as unbeatable this early on is “unfair.”

“There’s a lot of disenchantment with how the UC has been run. Matt Sundquist has played a large role [in that],” Willey says. “With everything that’s gone wrong in the last year, I think they are more vulnerable than past establishment tickets.”

—Staff writer Charles J. Wells can be reached at wells@fas.harvard.edu.