Campaigning and Harry Potter

Today’s morning session featured our second guest speaker for our class, Sam Arora. Sam is a Columbia graduate and a Maryland State Delegate. He came to speak to us about presidential campaigning and his presentation was titled “Winning the White House: Presidential Campaign Organization, Strategy and Tactics.” Sam described to us essentially how a presidential campaign is run. The basic requirements for a campaign are money, time and people. Sam outlined the basic game plan to getting elected which includes fulfilling the constitutional requirements for a presidential candidate including being a natural born citizen, securing a nomination from either the Democratic or Republican party and being very familiar with the electoral college process.

California has the largest number of electoral votes at 54. A presidential candidate needs 270 out of 538 electoral votes to win. When a candidate is deciding which states to campaign in, Sam told us they look at whether the candidate from the area and the party’s record in past elections to get a better sense of whether the candidate actually has a shot at winning the state. We also spent some time analyzing presidential video campaigns from John Kerry, Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama.

Today, we turned in our 12 page rough draft of our papers as well as our 15 source bibliography and footnotes. In the evening, Milani and I went to the Museum of Moving Images for a special showing of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. This is the first of many Harry Potter related events I plan on participating in during our last week in New York City, since we will not be allowed to watch the midnight showing of the final installment of the series: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt. 2.