Alessio Manti and Adam Thompson-Harvey sat on Deering Meadow with a small party of six Wednesday night when they received news they had lost the Associated Student Government election for president and vice president.
After receiving the phone call from a member of the ASG Election Commission, Manti announced the result to his supporters.
“We lost,” the SESP sophomore said, pausing reflectively. “By quite the margin, too.”
Manti and Weinberg sophomore Thompson-Harvey received 993 votes-29 percent of the total.
The two campaigned until the polls closed at 7 p.m. Afterward, Manti headed to Deering while Thompson-Harvey went to Loyola University to pick up his girlfriend, who wanted to be present and arrived shortly before results were announced.
Manti said he chose to wait for the results at Deering because it is “peaceful” and his favorite place at NU. While waiting for news from the commission, he said he and Thompson-Harvey had “run the kind of campaign we wanted to run.”
“I’m extremely nervous,” Thompson-Harvey said a few minutes before receiving news of the election results.
Reflecting on the experience prior to the phone call, Manti said he learned “discipline” and how to “not get riled up.” Though he met many new students throughout the campaign, he said he still doesn’t feel he completely “understands Northwestern.”
“One thing I have learned is that there is no one way to define what (NU) is,” he said. “It is hard to build community when there are so many fragmented parts of campus.”Campaign manager Maya Bhardwaj said she found the results of the election “perplexing.”
“We hoped to allow for a change for the status quo,” the Weinberg sophomore said. “We ran a good campaign, did things the way we wanted and stayed positive … I hope (Lew and Kawashima) do good things.”
After announcing the results to his supporters, Manti thanked them for their work on the campaign. Manti and Thompson-Harvey said they do not plan to become involved with ASG in the future but hope to carry out their campaign objectives in other ways, such as turning Manti’s company MyCat Enterprises into “less of a business and more of a social advocacy organization” to provide student services at NU.
“I know I have learned a lot about myself in the process and about Northwestern, and we ran a clean campaign,” Manti said. “We can hold our heads high.”
