After months of campaigning and hard work, senior Gabriel Plumer found out last week that he was elected to one of three seats on the township committee of Alexandria, N.J.
The Political Science major earned almost twice as many votes as opponent Curtis Schick, with the final tally of 1,213 to 625.
Although he admitted that he had been interested in politics since childhood, Plumer said that the impetus for actually running for a position in his hometown was when he realized that "we can only talk so much without doing something."
After filing the petition to run in January, Plumer went to Scotland to study abroad from February to the end of May.
It was there that he demonstrated his determination to run for a seat on the Alexandria township, making use of Skype and the internet to conduct his campaign all the way from across the Atlantic Ocean.
As soon as he was home - a week and a half before the June primary election - Plumer jumped straight into campaigning, mostly by putting up homemade signs and sending out letters to over 1,000 homes in Alexandria.
"The letter was really successful, again, because of the message I conveyed in the letter . . . Being able to connect with voters in a letter or with phone calls is extremely important in my town," Plumer said, citing the letters as one of his most successful campaign strategies.
Because of the scope of the campaign and the amount of work Plumer put into it, fundraising was not especially necessary; almost everything was self-financed, from the signs to the stamps and envelopes. After his victory in the June primary, Plumer had to begin preparing for the fall campaign, where he ran against an independent, Schick, who is a lifelong resident of the township and is heavily involved in the township government.
"It wasn't just a kind of, 'Oh, I'm running against an independent, it should be easy.' It was a difficult campaign," Plumer admitted.
Therefore, he often traveled back and forth from Hopkins to his home in order to work on his campaign.
Plumer said he, "campaigned on a platform of three types of themes . . . keeping spending and taxes low, increasing community involvement and bringing an energy and endurance to a town where there's going to be new challenges ahead."
Before he was even elected, he worked with a volunteer to create and sell a new Web site for the township in order to, "provide increased public knowledge of township governance and awareness of how [its] money is being spent."
He also spent a lot of time getting to know officials and residents of Alexandria during his campaign so as to gain some ideas of how to improve the mechanics and budgets of the town.
"I think I really do bring a sense of energy and have an endurance to deal with challenges as they come, and there will be challenges for our township," Plumer said, referring to why he believed he was better suited than Schick for the job.
Although he will not be assigned specific responsibilities in his new position until the reorganization meeting in January, Plumer believes that they will include the jobs which the incumbent whom he beat in the elections had - more specifically, deputy mayor and the chairperson of the Board of Health for the township.
For now, there are already challenges which Plumer is helping to resolve. He travels home once a month for meetings, despite the fact that his term does not technically start until January.
Plumer will serve on the committee for three years, and for those three years, his top priority is going to be working to help Alexandria.
Although he is not sure yet about whether he is going to apply to graduate school, he has applied for various jobs, but both paths will depend on whether he will be able to live in Alexandria for the next three years. "My intent and absolute priority is to be able to live in my township and if need be, commute to my job or to school," Plumer said.
Reactions among students to Plumer's victory were generally mixed.
"If he can handle it, it will be good for his experience," freshman Kayleigh Horst said.
"I mainly just think it's amazing that a student is doing this while he is still in college."
However, her classmate, Irma Zhang, disagreed, saying that she did not believe it was a good idea for Plumer to have run.
"His knowledge is only based on what he learned in books and school . . . he needs more life experience first in order to become a better politician and serve the people [in Alexandria]," Zhang said.
Plumer believes that it is good for high school and college students to be involved in politics, or at least to take an interest in their government.
He admits that when he first filed the petition back in January to run for this position, he never believed that he would actually win the election, but because of his persistence, he can now have a tremendous effect on his hometown.
"It kind of goes to show that you can do anything that you put your mind to and it doesn't necessarily have to be 20 years down the road. It could be now if you want it to be," he said.
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