My Experiences with Politics

My political life started in around 1999 when my uncle ran for the Jacksonville City Council. This was such a cool thing to me and it was so much fun watching him campaign and talk about the issues because he was so passionate. Every weekend, we were canvassing neighborhoods and getting signs out in people’s yards. I loved wearing his shirt and talking about it. This is when I caught the bug. I was hooked!

During the Summer and Winter of 2007, most of my time was spent working with a group of fellow young liberty lovers on Ron Paul’s grassroots campaign. This was one of the best experiences that I had in college. We worked our butts off to get his name out there and to build some support. We handmade almost 400 signs that we put up around town, setup tables in the Union, went to other clubs’ meetings and basically anything else that would spread word about our cause.

Working on this campaign was also fun for me because of how much I learned about running a successful online political campaign. Ron Paul’s campaign ran one of the most efficient online grassroots campaigns that the world has ever seen and those that ignored that missed out on a great learning experience about the future of elections.

In August 2008, I was searching for a campaign to work on for the upcoming election and everything that I was finding was for candidates that I strongly opposed. No amount of money is worth selling out. I was willing to move anywhere to work for a decent candidate. Then one day I was searching on Craigslist and came across an interesting post that was offering a paid trip to Southern California to work on a political campaign. My interests were peaked at this point. Could this have worked out any better?

After talking to a couple of the guys on the campaign, I decided to take the position and started my cross country drive to work the campaign. The drive took 4 days and 3 nights of solid driving. It was a great experience that I suggest everyone does at least once in their lives. This country is so big and there is no way to appreciate that until you have seen it.

The campaign was grueling and the hardest thing that I have ever done. We worked every single day for at least 12 hours a day, most days was more like 14-15 hours. We had one day off the entire time. Every day we would walk to around 100 homes, come back to the office and call about 80 people, hand write postcards after it was too late to call and then after that was all done we would work on projects. I learned more about myself in these 3 months than in the previous 24 years of my life.

From here on out, if I work with another campaign, it will be helping with their online campaigning strategy. This is where I really think that I could benefit a campaign the most and help them gain some serious ground. I have studied the most successful online campaigns from around the country in all levels of government and if run correctly, I really think that someone could win a campaign using solely the Internet to energize the voters.