Life on the Trail

By: Baylor Rodman

As a political junky, I have always aspired to find out what “the trail” is really like. You envision it in your head and sometimes see some of the candidate’s rallies broadcasted on TV, but I have come to realize it is much more intricate than it seems. On our first full day here, I traveled with three other members to cover New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s Town-Hall event in North Liberty. We arrived on the scene and . began to set up our equipment. I looked around to find people with their press passes that said, “NBC,” “CBS,” “CNN,” and “Fox News,” and then it hit me that we were now playing with the big boys. The sirens in my head were screaming, “this is not a drill.”

One thing I noticed was as big as the outlets they are working for are, many can then be intimidated by that, and I’d come to quickly find out Iowans would much rather speak about their political ideas to student journalists. Why that is I first didn’t understand. These people have got to know that their stories are going to meet a much smaller audience when talking to me then if they talked to NBC. I quickly realized it’s not about that to them. They understand the importance of their vote, the importance of the process, and the importance of going first. These people are constantly bombarded by outlets looking to most important information in politics right now: who will they caucus for. For once they know they have something every person with a camera wants, and I think they are enlightened to share their views and keep the tradition alive with the next generation. The power of student media is strong on the trail, much stronger than I originally thought.

Moving on the candidates now, Booker had originally surprised me. He was much more authentic and charismatic than I would have thought. Faith seemed to be one of the most important topics to him, which also took-me by a bit of surprise. His opening speech was much more about love in politics and love of the nation, then it was about any sort of policy, even adding at one point, “if you’re looking for a guy with a bunch of policy talk today, I’m not the guy for you.” Well it seems people were, as his polling in Iowa released just two days later had him at 3 percent, and four days later we would awake with the news he had suspended his campaign. Bye bye Booker.

On our third day in literal middle America, we headed to Newton, Iowa to see Senator Bernie Sanders. If you only got one thing out of that rally, and you very well may have, it’s that his supporters are still extremely upset with the democratic nomination process in 2016. They felt their voices were silenced, and that the democratic national committee was unwilling to accept the revolution they were trying to create. One thing I now can’t wrap my mind around, is that if you are split between Bernie and Elizabeth Warren. They share the same issues, have significantly similar platforms, and yet one does a ten times better job outlining and visualizing those platforms than the other; but that’s a story for another time.