Student reporters feel the heat of Election Night

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Editor’s Note: On Election Day, Nov. 7, 13 students from Bangor’s New England School of Communications, mostly freshmen and sophomores, hit the pavement and worked the phones to get a sense of what reporting on a statewide election might feel like. The students of Mike McCauley’s class COM 123, Fundamentals of Journalism, were led by project editors Ed Goguen, a junior from Brooks; and Alice Anderson, a freshman from Stonington, who take turns in this article, beginning with Goguen, chronicling some of the students’ efforts and their thoughts about the evening.

When I took on this job, I thought I’d be in for a rough ride.

So walking through the back door of the New England School of Communications on the Bangor campus of Husson College at about 6 p.m. Election Day, I was surprised by the silence.

It was short-lived.

I soon was standing outside the office of Mike McCauley, director of journalism, when he caught my eye and nodded. He couldn’t speak because a parade of people were following him and talking all at once. From then on, the second floor of our building was a circus staffed in part by six students from WHSN-FM, the student radio station. Those students and members of our class were running in and out of every room asking, “What now?”

Laying the groundwork

Covering the elections was important for us, since many people think young Americans are apathetic about politics. While we couldn’t get voter turnout figures for Husson students, we did learn that 48 percent, or just fewer than 800, of the University of Maine dorm students who are registered to vote in Orono cast ballots. That’s a considerably higher percentage than the 40 percent national turnout for all age groups.

Some of our discussions with young voters also indicated that most were passionate about voting and well-informed on the issues.

That contrasted sharply with the impressions project member Brittany Sawyer came away with after conducting 20 exit interviews in the morning at the Davis Road Community Center voting precinct in Bangor.

“On several occasions,” Sawyer said, “I had to explain to people who already voted about which issues the major parties stood for, the meanings of ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice,’ and the general difference between liberals and conservatives.

“It didn’t make me angry, but did make me wonder what happens when so many uninformed people vote,” she said.

Best-laid plans

As part of our planning, some NESCom project members had set up interviews with gubernatorial candidates and made arrangements to attend campaign and Election Night functions.

Despite the advance preparation, some project members soon learned they needed to be flexible when candidates either failed to return calls or went off topic so much in responding to questions that their answers were unusable on the radio and in print.

When one student backed out of the project at the last minute, Nathan Fournier, who was assigned an interview with U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, was asked to fill in and interview U.S. Rep. Michael Michaud. Fournier was unable to connect with Michaud’s campaign staff, and the interview with Allen also fell through.

Professor McCauley “told me not to worry,” Fournier said later, “because missed interviews are sometimes part of the business. I felt useless, though, because I wanted to do something other than sitting down and interviewing the cheese pizza that was on the table.”

Other project members also were forced to adapt to deadline pressures and look for alternative story ideas.

Aaron Larsen and Andy McKenna hopped into a car to see whether any campaign staffers were lingering at their party’s headquarters in Bangor. Kaitie Bielinski headed to Baldacci’s restaurant to wait for the results, hearing the loud chant of “four more years” as TV stations updated projections.

Patrick Giorgio had a tough night, as he was unable to reach independent gubernatorial candidate Barbara Merrill in Lincolnville Beach. He was disappointed, but followed up on a tip about people at the Bangor High School polls who were collecting signatures for a referendum question about the medical use of marijuana. Giorgio finished that story but overall felt “as if everybody was running around [NESCom] trying to set up a big party that never happened in the end.”

Patrick also commented that it “was weird seeing students and teachers who are Democrats and Republicans, and some in between, all working on finding the same news, and as much of it as possible. [In spite of the chaos] some people were able to accomplish impressive things.”

One definite coup was a phone interview McCauley had arranged with Harvard political scientist Thomas Patterson. McCauley handed me a sheet of possible questions and I talked with Patterson for about 15 minutes.

In discussing the Taxpayer Bill of Rights referendum question that was on the ballot, Patterson explained that citizen initiatives “used to be a good idea when special interest lobbyists had too much power over state legislators.”

Back then, said Patterson, they gave residents a measure of control. Now, he said, they’re simply a different kind of staging ground for special interest contributions – pushed through petition drives and media hype instead of statehouses. He claimed that referendums such as TABOR are generally “bad ideas,” since they can “hamstring government to the point where essential services are cut back.” Patterson mentioned a similar taxpayer initiative in California that gutted the state’s once-excellent educational system.

McCauley and I edited the interview to use one of the juicy quotes on WHSN-FM that evening.

At about 9 p.m. I handed off the reins to my co-editor Anderson and left the facilities.

A taxpayer tussle

When Goguen left the building, he said the information coming from our reporters was “overwhelming.” To me, our second-floor headquarters looked like a henhouse, with McCauley as the rooster and all of us chickens scratching around for some kind of orders or approval.

The Maine-based story that held the most drama was TABOR – the ballot initiative to link increased government spending to inflation and population growth and requiring voter approval for tax and fee increases.

Sarah Savage, a proponent of this measure, wanted to cover the story and was willing to travel in order to be with its biggest supporters. After contacting TABOR’s chief proponent, Mary Adams, she was “thrilled to get an e-mail back saying that [Adams] and others would love me to join them down south at the Portland Club.”

Savage got there around 7 p.m. Adams arrived an hour later and sat at a nearby table. Her husband introduced her to Savage, who found her easy to talk with. “I felt as if I had known her for years,” said Savage. As time wore on, it became apparent that TABOR would be defeated. Adams said she would not propose any more taxpayer referendums, but Sarah noted that “her charismatic nature and sincerity were an inspiration and served to strengthen my already unwavering support of her cause.”

Turning the pen on ourselves

Back at election headquarters, James Cirell and Tania Morales had been assigned to cover four close races for seats in the Legislature, to gauge the odds of a partisan power change in Augusta. While they had background information and phone numbers, their candidates were impossible to reach after the polls closed.

At that point, McCauley decided they should wander the halls of NESCom to “report on the reporters.” There was plenty to take in. Cirell headed to the conference room for pizza and soda, and Morales ended up there as well, along with other staffers who had constantly shifting moments of downtime.

“We watched the national coverage on TV. It was interesting seeing the professionals do it, knowing that they have 100 times the sources and resources we had on this night,” said Cirell.

Our in-house reporters found that other teammates’ reactions to their first journalism project were mixed. Patrick Giorgio said, “Everyone was stressed.” Ryan Olderman thought the pace was quick, but had fun interviewing people at the Bangor Mall and, later on, at Dysart’s in Hermon (with Brittany Sawyer). Almost everyone was blown away by the deadlines and minicrises that popped up through the night as we worked our own stories and fed sound bites to WHSN-FM from taped interviews.

In the end, Cirell came away with a positive view. “Although some of the individual goals were not achieved, the main goal was. We covered the election as best we could and were able to contact a lot of people. We even contacted some of the candidates in the middle of what would seem a very stressful night for them as well,” he said.

Looking ahead

What did this experience mean to our students? Seeing what they saw, and interviewing the people they did, what were their impressions about our state, its people and the future of the nation?

In the days to come, they would be impressed to learn that Maine’s voter turnout rate was 58 percent – a higher rate than projected here and much higher than the national rate of 40 percent.

In our first attempt to find turnout rates for college-age students, an Elections Division employee in Augusta said, “We’re not interested in that.” This seemed to diminish some students’ newfound interest in politics, and sadly reinforced their feelings about some older voters who really didn’t understand the people or issues they were voting for. Granted, some college students were equally ill-informed. But if we could show that young people like us are not the political couch potatoes that some older adults think we are, wouldn’t that inspire everyone to do better at the polls?

In terms of state politics, it was interesting that the governor’s office and Legislature remained in Democratic hands, even though Republicans in Maine outpaced the entire nation in their percentage of increased voter turnout.

Andy McKenna said Gov. John Baldacci probably will raise taxes, and he is eager to see exactly what Baldacci will do after winning with only 38 percent of the vote. Brittany Sawyer was more optimistic, arguing that the Democrats’ dominance in Augusta shows that “people like the way the state is run.” Most of our student reporters are left of center in their politics, with Sawyer, for example, seeing the Democratic takeover in Congress as a good thing. McKenna contemplated all the changes that might happen in the nation’s capital – the firing of Donald Rumsfeld being the first.

Again, much to our surprise, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights was the most important issue in the election in Maine – certainly for the political scientists we spoke with and, in some cases, for our own staff members. Ed Goguen argued that while “taxes are high, the problem [in Maine] is that people don’t make enough money to pay them. I think TABOR would have made things worse.”

“Education, or the lack thereof, is the problem,” he said, explaining that better education would lead to better jobs and higher incomes.”

Sarah Savage took a sharply different view, saying that Maine seems to be in an overall decline.

“With taxes being so high and constantly getting higher, and Mainers not willing to adopt change, we’re going to lose good people,” she said. “Small businesses cannot survive in this kind of economy, so many of our hardest workers will leave the state, which will only serve to weaken the economy more.”

Why would Maine’s brightest students remain here, Savage asked, when all of their hard-earned money would be taken from them in taxes? Savage also wondered about the impact in the next few years of the stunning shift in congressional politics. “Republicans can no longer be constantly blamed for everything that goes wrong,” she said. “Democrats will have to take some responsibility, and if the Democrats do a poor job in the next two years, I’m sure a Republican president will be elected in 2008.”

And so went our project of Election Night coverage.

PHOTO BY GREG PARKER

Freshmen Tania Morales (right) and James Cirell of NESCom listen to Mike McCauley, NESCom director of journalism, as he reviews Election Night coverage ideas with them.

No. 1

PHOTO BY DAVE DANE

Juniors Brittany Sawyer and Ryan Olderman of the New England School of Communications in Bangor discuss some of the interviews they conducted with voters on Election Day at locations in the Bangor area.