Ohio University College Democrats President Sam Miller and Vice President Anthony Eliopoulos hope to unite college Democrats across the state by running for positions in the College Democrats of Ohio.
Miller is running for vice president of the organization, and Eliopoulos is running for communications director.
“College Democrats of Ohio is the governing body that oversees all the chapters of College Democrats at various campuses in the state of Ohio,” Miller said. “Our main goal is getting kids involved on college campuses with democratic policy and politics.”
Miller and Eliopoulous are running on a ticket with five other people. Their ticket’s platform focuses on three main pillars: engage, assemble and unite.
“Basically what that means is we just want to create coalitions between our chapters throughout the state,” Miller said. “We want people to work together if they’re close in proximity. If they have the same representative, we want them to be able to reach out to one another and work on programming.”
Miller and Eliopoulous are joined on the ticket by Matt Ziegman, a junior studying economics and political science at Miami University.
Ziegman said their platform aims to make the College Democrats of Ohio “more transparent and straightforward.”
Miller said she decided to run for vice president after working this year as communications director and seeing some holes in the leadership. She is running against Hana Barkowitz from Kent State University for the vice president position.
“I talked to my friend Matt (Ziegman), and we both kind of had similar ideas of what we wanted the organization to become and how we wanted to constantly be working to better it as a whole,” she said. “We both really want to make this organization, that’s already really great, better, especially since we are going into 2017, and we are about to have of our elected officials become Republicans.”
Miller said she hopes to transform the vice president’s role if elected by not only doing what the president cannot take on, but also by looking at diversity issues in different chapters.
“I really want to produce a report of the state of college Democrats in Ohio,” she said. “As of right now the vice president has a very vague role, but I really want to be able to talk with chapters, understand issues they have going on on their campuses and how I can fit in with finding solutions and working with them on diversity issues specifically, because it’s something I’m really passionate about.”
Eliopoulos, a junior studying political science and strategic communication, said he hopes to develop better communication across College Democrats' chapters and get their name out more.
“When something happens, we’re going to make it publicized and get it out to the press and really highlight what we do,” he said. “As college students, we’re the biggest voting block now.”
Each candidate will know if they won at the College Democrats spring conference. The date and location are to be determined.
“At the end (of the conference) we follow with voting, and each chapter individually gets three votes per office,” Ziegman said. “Sam could receive all three votes from Ohio State, she could receive none of the votes, or Ohio State could choose to split their votes between Sam or the other opponent.”
If elected, both Miller and Eliopoulos said they would not run to hold an executive position within OU’s chapter of College Democrats.
“I’ve been really fortunate to serve as president this past year, and I won't be running again because I do want to make sure that people who are leaders of my chapter have the chance to grow into these positions,” Miller said.
Miller said OU has a strong College Democrats chapter and student body, both that are passionate about change.
"I really want to take that to a state level and show people ‘look, if this can happen in a small university in the Appalachian hills of Ohio, it can happen anywhere.’ OU honestly has really equipped me,” she said.
