ASUCD campaigns are all slop and no substance
Being an informed voter is difficult when campaigns don’t stand for anything
By NEVEN BISINOVSKI — ndbisinovski@ucdavis.edu
The recent Associated Students of UC Davis (ASUCD) Senate campaigns were an embarrassment to student democracy. Scrolling through slates’ Instagram pages, like those of AVANZA, EMPOWERED, STFU (Stop Taking From Us) or GOAT (Greater Opportunities, Affordability and Transparency) yields little information from which voters can form a decision regarding their candidates of choice. A vast majority of candidates ran on the same agreeable and vague promises to bring down costs, increase opportunities and cultivate a more equitable environment for students. However, campaign materials lacked both detailed explanations regarding these promises and tangible plans for their fruition.
The AVANZA slate’s slogan, “Advancing the policies that matter the most to you,” exemplifies this — nowhere in their campaign were any tangible policies listed. This campaign therefore put voters in a position where they had to blindly assume that the candidates’ priorities aligned with theirs — without concrete positions to substantiate such an assumption. The diversity of voters’ priorities was completely disregarded, with the slate foolishly assuming that voters were one-faceted. This ambiguity allowed the campaign to appeal to everyone without making a commitment to anyone — demonstrating a lazy, catch-all campaign strategy. Such laziness is unacceptable and voters should not accept such a lack of policy detail from potential campus policymakers.
Another example of campaign superficiality lies with the EMPOWER slate: Their stated goals of “advancing equity and inclusion” and “advocating for a safer, more accessible campus” were conveniently vague, leaving students no more informed about the candidates’ actual priorities. With UC Davis’ current standing as one of the most inclusive and diverse campuses in the nation, running broadly on “equity and inclusion” does not pack a punch. Campaigns that cite such a goal must therefore be specific in identifying how their vision will maintain UC Davis’ equitable environment, allowing voters to know which groups candidates will uplift and how they plan on doing so.
Without proper substance, using loaded, activistic rhetoric in campaign materials weaponizes voters’ good faith. Voters do not learn anything about their candidates’ actual priorities and are instead wooed by feel-good buzzwords. Two candidates can thus claim to stand for equity and inclusion, but their methods of implementing their view of it will differ greatly. For such coveted issues, voters deserve to know how candidates will govern. If this jargonization of inclusive language continues, UC Davis will forget the value of its diversity and stop prioritizing it for all students.
This failure of candidates to differentiate themselves is one of the core problems with ASUCD campaign culture. When every candidate promises concepts that sound agreeable, but few explain how they would deliver them, the ballot presents a list of personalities when it should be showcasing competing visions. Voters are thus left unclear as to what choice they are actually making and what they can expect from candidates once they are in office.
This is damaging for two reasons: First, without concrete commitments, candidates possess no doctrine nor principles to guide their decision-making when compromises must be made. Everyone supports student affordability, but which programs should receive more funding, and what should be cut to pay for them? Voters deserve to know how a candidate would approach choices that cannot please everyone — such difficult decisions are inevitable.
Second, accountability is impossible to achieve without concrete promises. How can we determine whether a Senator fulfilled a commitment to “advance equity” when they never identified a specific problem, proposed an intervention or established a measure of success? Officials can skew almost any activity to be presented as progress toward a promise. But when it cannot be measured, it is difficult for voters to evaluate whether it has been broken, degrading voters’ overall capability for discernment.
The argument that ASUCD is “only” a student government and that campaigns don’t need to be complex, is naive. The positions being contested are not inconsequential — quite the contrary: ASUCD operates on a $22 million annual budget and supports more than 30 units and services — including Unitrans, Coffee House and basic need units like the The Pantry. Administrative decisions affect student employment, transportation and essential services that have a campus and city-wide ripple effect. ASUCD is therefore an institution that makes real choices with legitimate impacts, and its candidates should be held to a standard that honors its importance.
The general character of ASUCD campaigns is one of people-pleasing and fluff — easy for candidates to peddle as they avoid discomfort and maximize voter reach. But, the solution is to accept this very discomfort; standing for something must be normalized as the core value of these campaigns, with acceptance of the alienation that comes with it being paramount for voters’ discernment. Running on specific, measurable policies and defending a core vision of success should be the first priority of campaign formulation. It’s this that will inform voters who they actually want in office — and who they don’t.
The implications of this sloppy campaign culture do not contain themselves to our campus, students are being conditioned to accept politics as a parade of pleasant intentions, while aspiring politicians learn that avoiding substantive commitments is a viable electoral strategy. If we normalize political emptiness in university — the place where many of us first participate in constitutional democracy — the standard to which we hold our state and national officials will be inadequate, eroding our nation’s democratic strength.
Written by: Neven Bisinovski — ndbisinovski@ucdavis.edu
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