Story Time: The Time I Forced A Whole Campaign To Drop Out of The University of Tennessee Student Government Elections
During my senior year at the University of Tennessee, my tendency to be a bit bold kicked up a lot of dust with the student government crowd, and when I had the opportunity to sink the ship of one of the worst campaigns, I took it.
The “Tennessee Way” campaign was easily the most annoying of the four campaigns vying for control of the (largely useless) student government, relying on a series of Trumpian candidates who were clearly unqualified for any sort of leadership positions and frankly just unintelligent. Their decidedly conservative posture had them poised to coast into the three highest offices (President, Vice President, and Student Services Director) and sweep a lot of the senate seats, while the three more liberal campaigns were cannibalizing one another’s support.
I was leaving UT soon and I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it came to SGA (after getting involved myself, I found it to be a way for overly ambitious college kids to pad their resumes without actually having to accomplish anything, though campaigns will occasionally stumble into a situation where they can affect change), and I was in a unique position to neuter the Tennessee Way campaign and make way for a more honest campaign to come in.
I had been involved in a months-long casual relationship with one of the young men at the very top of the Tennessee Way’s ticket. Personally, he was an arrogant dick, and I told him as much on a few occasions, but our arrangement scratched an itch for both of us (what can I say, I was a 22 year old guy in college). Occasionally, he and I would have more mundane conversations before or after our meetups, and he would often talk about how the campaign was going. I couldn’t have been less interested in his faux political wins and woes, but his arrogance was his fatal flaw and I was able to play him like a fiddle: I pretended to find his dramatic campaign stories fascinating, and he would absolutely gush, often indiscriminately. On multiple occasions in person and in writing, he told me about how he had offered multiple campaigns blank checks to allow him to run for one of the big three spots at the top of their ticket. The first campaign to which he made this offer refused. The second campaign to which he made this offer accepted, and that was the Tennessee Way.
I sat on that information for a while, but after a bit of time and a lot of inflammatory, Trumpian rhetoric from the Tennessee Way campaign, and approximately a week before the election, I met with the SGA Election Commission to show them screenshots of my conversations with the young man who made the offer. They approached the Tennessee Way campaign for an explanation, and when faced with the irrefutable evidence that the names at the top of their ticket had bribed each other to the tune of $2000, the entire campaign dropped out of the race within hours.
And in the words of Marty Huggins, “and that’s my story!”