Because no single candidate won a majority of the presidential vote Wednesday, Northwestern’s Associated Student Government will hold a run-off between the top two remaining candidates Friday.
Weinberg junior Victor Shao and Medill junior Brad Stewart received a plurality with 1,509 votes, but fell roughly 300 votes short of the majority required to win the election. They will compete with SESP junior Kameron Dodge and Communication junior Steven Monacelli, who finished second with 1,172 votes. The team of Weinberg juniors Dan Tully and Jeziel Jones were eliminated from the running after receiving 829 votes.
Though the results of the presidential election were inconclusive, both of the night’s other elections finished with a winner. McCormick sophomore Neil Mehta was named Academic Vice President with 1,548 votes, defeating Weinberg junior Ian Coley’s 1,139 votes. McCormick sophomore Alex Van Atta was declared Student Life Vice President after beating Weinberg sophomore Carla Berkowitz 1,577 votes to 964 votes.
Mehta, who was in a peer adviser training session when he got the call he had won, said he hopes to continue building support in order to implement solutions and ideas that come from students themselves.
“(I want to) try to engage students and get them more interested in what the academic committee can do for them,” he said.
Van Atta said Wednesday he was “kind of in shock” after hearing the results. Berkowitz sent him a Facebook message after the results congratulating on the win, but did not respond to a call requesting comment.
“I’m really looking forward to what we can accomplish,” Van Atta said. “The top priority for me is to make the student life committee more visible to the students, and that they know what we’re working on, that we’re a voice for them.”
Upon hearing their results, both of the remaining presidential tickets, Dodge and Shao, immediately met with their respective campaign staffs. Representatives for each ticket said they would continue with their previous campaign strategies in the hope of securing a majority within the next two days.
“We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing,” Stewart said. “From the beginning, it’s been about students expressing themselves, and that’s what it’s going to keep being about.”
Weinberg senior Max Brawer, a campaign consultant for Dodge and Monacelli, said a run-off election was “certainly a contingency” for which the candidates were prepared and that they would continue to “fight a good fight” in the coming days.
Despite their defeat, Tully and Jones, who campaigned heavily on a platform of shifting the focus of ASG back to the student body, remained positive about the outcome of the election, saying they were proud of the support they had managed to gather and were hopeful their platform would affect the actions of the remaining candidates.
“We got 829 votes. That’s a victory for us,” Tully said. “We really came through for each other in this election. We changed the discourse. We shifted the other teams to talk about what we had been talking about.”
Jones said the election had given him a sense of how “backwards” and socially divided the NU community can be. He pointed to a “ruling percentile” at NU, which he said controlled the positions of power at NU, and that his campaign had attempted to disrupt.
“There is a 1 percent at Northwestern, or maybe a little more than a 1 percent,” Jones said. “They go to each others’ parties, they rub each others’ backs. It doesn’t have anything to do with their skills. That’s just the fact of the matter.”
According to Jones, neither he nor Tully plan to officially endorse either of the remaining candidates. He said he hoped Shao and Dodge would focus on erasing the social distinctions between NU students, but remarked that it would take something “very drastic” to make the now-defunct campaign support either of them in the run-off.
None of the remaining candidates have said they will actively pursue an endorsement from Tully and Jones. In a statement to The Daily, Dodge said he would respect the decision not to support a candidate. Similarly, Shao said he wanted to focus on the sentiment of Tully and Jones’ campaign rather than request an endorsement.
“Dan and Jeziel ran a great campaign, and while we would appreciate any additional student support, what is more important is the ideas and philosophy they espoused,” Shao said.
The run-off on Friday will be the first since 2009, when Mike McGee (Communication ’10) defeated Bill Pulte (Medill ’10) to win the presidency. Write-in votes will not be permitted in the run-off, but no confidence votes will.
Lauren Caruba, Joseph Diebold, Maria LaMagna and Lark Turner contributed reporting.
