News-Letter

Media Credit: Elaine Yu Plumer campaigned and won a seat on the township committee of his hometown, Alexandria, N.J.

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."

Continued...

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