November 20, 2024
Dear Parents,
It’s been quite an adventure this trimester in our Presidential Campaign 2024 elective. This was my third time teaching a politics elective at ACDS, and I’ve learned not to plan too much of it in advance, since it’s the developments of the campaign that fuel our activities and discussions. Each day brought something new and often unexpected. Highlights of our time together included:
Playing the iCivics computer game “Win the White House” to simulate the experience of running a presidential campaign and accumulating 270 electoral votes
Discussing the presidential and vice presidential debates, with a particular focus on the art of deflection
Analyzing a series of swing state ads produced by the rival campaigns
Researching the most hotly contested Senate races and the candidates’ biographies
Dissecting the messages about Jewish Americans and Indian Americans in the campaign discourse (over half of our class identifies as being from one of those two groups)
Laughing through a Saturday Night Live campaign-sketch marathon the Friday before Election Day
I also brought in four guest speakers to chat with the students about various aspects of the election:
Amiya Bansal ’21 is an ACDS alumna who has spent her high school years working on campaigns, at policy institutes, and at City Hall. Amiya engaged in an energetic discussion with our class about her work on this year’s Liccardo and Mulcahy campaigns and the value of local government.
Robert Howell, Mrs. Johnson’s father and a perennial Republican candidate, ran this year for a California Senate seat. Mr. Howell patiently answered the students’ questions about MAGA issue positions and emphasized the importance of speaking up for what you believe in.
Josh Keller, a former student of mine who is taking a gap year between college at Wash U and Harvard Law School, Zoomed with us from Wisconsin, where he was working as an organizer for the Harris-Walz campaign. Josh took us behind the scenes of voter outreach and discussed reasons why many young people were committed to defeating Donald Trump this year.
And as a spontaneous post-election addition to our schedule, last week our class Zoomed with 18-year-old Josh A. from the swing state of Georgia, who identifies as Jewish and queer and voted for Trump. (Josh’s father is an old friend of mine.) Josh helped our class understand why most demographic groups, including groups typically associated with the Democratic coalition, moved further in Trump’s direction this year.
Although our focus was mainly on national politics, we did take some time to follow local races and statewide propositions. During the week of the Catalina trip, our 6th and 8th graders sifted through piles of campaign mailers and voter guides to make sense of the largely nonpartisan candidates and issues and decide how they would vote if they could. In the process, they recognized how complicated policy debates are and how easy it is for campaigns and special interests to manipulate voters who don’t have a ton of time to read up on the issues.
The immediate post-election period was difficult and confusing for much of the class. We worked together to make sense of the larger economic and societal forces that made 2024 a difficult year for incumbent parties across the globe, as well as the unique personal qualities that have propelled Donald Trump ever upward even as the larger MAGA movement has sputtered in elections without him on the ballot. We tracked the “blame game” currently engulfing Democrats and evaluated what we think went wrong for the party. And we previewed some of the controversial cabinet nominations Trump has rolled out in the past week.
Ultimately, I hope this elective instilled in these students an interest in politics, not just as an intriguing “sport” to follow but more importantly as an ongoing series of choices that have real effects on people’s lives, worth getting outraged over and worth participating in themselves in whatever ways they can. I also hope many of these students have brought some of their conversations home with them, and that you too have benefited from your children’s insights and questions about the election. It has been a true honor to experience the fall of 2024 with this group of kids, and I look forward to teaching each of them in other contexts in the coming months and years.
Keep calm-ala and carry on-ala,
Mike Fishback