Campaign Trails

There’s nothing glamorous about grassroots campaign work: Knocking on doors, spending long hours in makeshift rental offices, and making endless phone calls isn’t everyone’s idea of nirvana. But Samantha Sencer-Mura ’11 took to these tasks like Dan Rather to a metaphor.

“There’s a bug that many of us get on campaigns,” says the Minneapolis native and fourth-generation Japanese American, who majored in critical theory and social justice at Occidental. “You either drink the Kool-Aid and you love it, or you cannot understand why someone would be devoting three months of their lives to the madness that is any political election.”

Campaigning for presidential candidate Barack Obama ’83 in her hometown in 2008, Sencer-Mura guzzled the Kool-Aid. “It was a very exciting time politically,” she recalls. “I was really interested in the idea of getting hands-on experience in the field. It felt like a great way to be engaged in this important moment in our country, and get more connected to the place where I grew up.”

After earning a master’s in education from Harvard University in 2017, Sencer-Mura moved back to Minneapolis that year, volunteering for campaigns and getting involved in local races. In 2022, she ran for state legislature—and won, and now she is representing South Minneapolis in the Minnesota House of Representatives. It’s quite a leap from knocking on doors during Campaign Semester, but Sencer-Mura hasn’t forgotten how it all began.

“Having campaigned for many cycles now, I have more of a perspective about how unique that moment was,” she says. “I would come to people’s doors and they would be crying about the importance of the election. And I think about what my ancestors would think about this moment and the progress our country has made.”

Over the last nine even-year election cycles, 148 Oxy students have opted into Campaign Semester, which offers participants a chance to take an active role in a living, breathing political campaign. Students get a full semester of class credit for their 10 weeks in the trenches—and for more than a handful of alumni, the program has been a gateway to a career in politics, advocacy work, and even elected office.

Many of them find their way back to politics, such as Ben Dalgetty ’10, who lives in Seattle and serves as internal communications manager for Mayor Bruce Harrell, for whom he has worked since 2022.

“My earliest political memory was during second grade,” says Dalgetty, who grew up in Oakland. “When the Oakland Teachers Union went on strike, my mom and I brought baked goods for the teachers on the picket line.”

His political passion continued as a student at Skyline High School. “I was involved in protests when the Iraq War started,” Dalgetty says. “Then a group of friends and I drove out to Reno, Nev., for a weekend in 2004 to knock on doors for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.”

Dalgetty enrolled at Occidental as a recipient of the Robert S. and Marianna Osborne Fuller 1926 Scholarship (“I’m forever grateful for that”). In April 2008, during primary season, he went to Philadelphia to volunteer for Obama: “I really liked what he was saying,” Dalgetty says, “and it didn’t hurt that he went to Occidental.”

Dalgetty continued with the campaign into the fall, under the auspices of the newly created Campaign Semester. He spent much of his time in Butler, Pa., as well as West Virginia. “It was great and unusual to get to do that in college and to still get credit,” he says.

Sixteen years later, he reflects often on his Campaign Semester experience: “It really exposed me to so many different kinds of people,” he says. “It challenges you in a way that you’re just not going to get as part of your regular coursework.”

Elina Woolever ’22 made her first foray into politics in her hometown of Bruns­wick, Maine. As a junior and senior at Brunswick High School, she served as a student representative to the local school board, dealing with issues ranging from “the curriculum to school safety and gun violence,” she says. “The stuff we were talking about actually impacted me and my classmates.”

As a sophomore at Oxy, with COVID in full swing, Woolever realized her dream of studying abroad wasn’t going to happen. But Campaign Semester filled that desire and played to her love of politics.

“I liked that it was offering students full-time campaign experience in a different location without having to take time off,” says Woolever, who worked for retired astronaut Mark Kelly’s Senate race in 2020, serving as a field organizer based in Tucson but traveling throughout southeast Arizona. “The majority of the role was phone banking and calling every voter, watching out for any kind of voter suppression,” she says.

After earning a master’s in geopolitics, resources, and territory from King’s College in London last year, Woolever is back in Tucson working for RISE, a youth-led advocacy nonprofit. “Our work focuses on making higher education more accessible and more affordable,” she explains. “We feel we can make a difference on the college affordability crisis by getting more young people involved in the political process.”

California native Robert Sandoval ’13 has politics and public service in his DNA. His mother, Lori, was a project manager for the city of Pasadena, and his father, Jose, was a Santa Ana city attorney. “My earliest memories are sitting on the floor of the living room when the adults were talking politics, and realizing how impactful political decisions are on people’s everyday lives,” he says.

As a student at Glendora High School, Sandoval was “obsessed” with basketball, he says. But he also nurtured his political interests through a program called California YMCA Youth and Government, in which students engaged in mock government modeled after the California State Legislature.

In looking at colleges, Sandoval wanted to stay local, having never left the state. Occidental appealed to him for the intimate class sizes, diverse student body, and Campaign Semester.

Working for the Illinois Democratic Coordinated Campaign to elect candidates up and down the ballot, Sandoval “hit the ground running,” he recalls, helping manage a field office on the southwest side of Chicago in a primarily Spanish-speaking area.

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics Peter Dreier, who co-founded Campaign Semester, “pushed me to step out of my comfort zone,” Sandoval recalls. “I asked myself, ‘Am I really ready to spend time outside of California by myself working on a campaign?’ But the experience set me up for my educational and professional future.”

After completing his studies at the University of Chicago Law School, Sandoval moved back to his home state and became a California deputy attorney general, hired by then-state Attorney General Kamala Harris. Currently Sandoval is a corporate attorney in San Rafael, where he’s vice chair of the San Rafael Park and Recreation Commission and board member with the Point San Pedro Road Coalition.

Ask Fernando Abcara ’14 where he grew up, and Los Angeles is the quick answer. But the longer reply is more nuanced: “I don’t think that I’ve lived anywhere for probably more than four years,” he says. “I moved around a lot, honestly”—a trajectory that includes Pico Rivera, South Los Angeles, Pomona, El Monte, Highland Park, and Eagle Rock. 

Abcara’s parents migrated from El Salvador in the 1980s. They lost their home in the recession of 2008—an experience that has informed his career. “The work that I’ve done has centered around housing justice and housing policy,” he says. “My parents worked their whole life to buy that house.”

Abcara became aware of Campaign Semester as a sophomore at Oxy. “It coincided with my parents losing their home, and I was engaging in more politics courses at the time.” He took his talents to Miami (“very conservative, even among the Latinx community”) to work on President Obama’s reelection campaign in the fall of his senior year.

Much of Abcara’s outreach involved engaging with older Cuban migrants, and one evening, he was driving a volunteer named Pinky home. As they passed a dilapidated neighborhood elementary school that had been shut down, “Pinky said, ‘Once Obama is reelected, he’s gonna change all of this,’” Abcara recalls. “But I realized the chances of Obama changing that school were very slim. In that moment, I wished that I would have done a local campaign. I thought, ‘Community organizing is the thing for me.’”

After graduating from Oxy with a double major in politics and Spanish studies, Abcara got a master’s in urban planning at UCLA. In between, he spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in El Salvador, and a second stint as a Fulbright Alumni Ambassador—the first Oxy graduate selected for this honor.

For the last four years, Abcara has been a national field organizer for the Right to the City Alliance, a group that supports local communities in creating grassroots power and dealing with gentrification and displacement, among other issues. “It’s ironic that now I do national work,” he admits, “but Campaign Semester propelled me in this direction, which I’m honestly grateful for.”

Sunari Weaver-Anderson ’24’s hometown of Oakland has a long and storied history of political and social activism—and at age 14, Weaver-Anderson participated in the Standing Rock protests against the construction of an oil pipeline that threatened Native American water rights. “It was amazing to see folks my own age coming together, and nobody was telling us to do it,” she says. “We were angry, we were agitated, and seeing that agitation can turn into collective action was really powerful.”

In her hunt for a college, Campaign Semester “was honestly the reason why Oxy shot to the top of my list,” Weaver-Anderson says. The politics major and Obama Scholar spent the fall 2022 semester in Pennsylvania working with UNITE HERE Philadelphia, the local hospitality and food service union, backing a Democratic slate that included John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro.

“I was trained to go door to door, meeting voters and being able to canvass them deeply, getting to know what’s important to them,” Weaver-Anderson says. “It was life-changing.” (And shoe-changing: “I brought one pair of Converses and by the end of the campaign, the soles were detached. They were falling out on the airplane home.”)

After graduating from Occidental in May, Weaver-Anderson went to work as a field organizing lead with UNITE HERE Arizona, where she was responsible for training a team of up to 20 canvassers leading to the November election. (While Trump avenged his 2020 loss at the top of the ticket, a bright spot for Democrats was electing Ruben Gallego to the U.S. Senate.) After “working my butt off to bring home Arizona for the Democratic Party,” she says, “I’m hoping to keep going in the movement.”

Noah Sullivan ’24 took his first dive into politics in his adopted hometown of Petersburg, Alaska, a locale of around 3,000 where the temperature seldom rises above 60°F. In the warmth of the TV glow, “I grew up watching Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart with my parents,” he says. “And I remember the energy of the 2008 election, and that exposure as a child set me on this path.”

Sullivan interned at the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau as a high school senior, and he worked on several races in Alaska in 2020. During the pandemic, his first year at Oxy was remote, but he says Professor Dreier played a crucial part in his political development.

Sullivan spent his Campaign Semester working for Mission for Arizona, the state Democratic Party’s campaign to elect Democratic candidates vying for offices from governor to Congress. They won every election across the board. Beyond participating in that triumphant sweep, Sullivan’s time there was a homecoming. “I was born in Mesa while my mom was getting her master’s, and I ended up knocking on thousands of doors all over that area.”

During the 2024 election season, Sullivan worked on Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s successful reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District. The Democrat incumbent narrowly held off Republican challenger Joe Kent in a rematch of the 2022 campaign.

“I applied at first as a field organizer, knocking on doors and making phone calls like I did in Arizona,” Sullivan says. But after a series of conversations with Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign personnel, he accepted the role of deputy organizing director.

With the election in his rearview mirror, Sullivan is mulling over his next move. “I have gotten to know the 3rd District fairly well,” he says. “I’ve gotten sort of used to the environment and the politics here. Really, anything could happen.” Isn’t that always the case in politics? 

Freelance writer Peter Gilstrap wrote “New Faces of 2027” in the Fall 2023 issue.

Top photo: Ben Dalgetty ’10 in the Office of the Mayor in Seattle.