There's nothing quite like getting a behind-the-scenes look at an electoral candidate and his or her campaign.
Here's your look, and I hope it helps you realize that when some candidates say they care about college-aged students, they don't mean it.
You may have seen the Daily Lobo voter guide Monday, and you may have noticed that four candidates' responses were missing - three Republicans and one Democrat.
While it's a concern that four people didn't respond, what's more disconcerting is that neither Attorney General Patricia Madrid nor Rep. Heather Wilson responded. Those two candidates are in a race for the 1st Congressional District seat, arguably the closest and most important race on the ballot.
Both campaigns gave the Lobo curious responses, and readers deserve to know what those were.
The Lobo sent questions to each campaign Thursday, and each campaign told us that was ample time to respond. Not once did anyone we talked to from either campaign tell us that responding would be too difficult. The Lobo's five questions were sent to both candidates at the same time, so each one had the same amount of time as her opponent to respond. E-mails and phone calls were left with people in each campaign Thursday through Sunday reminding them of our Sunday deadline.
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Sunday came, and we didn't have responses from Madrid or Wilson. We started calling at 11 a.m. We talked to people at each campaign who said it still would not be a problem to finish the responses. At about 5 p.m., Wilson's campaign was the first to tell us that it would be impossible to respond to our questions by deadline. A volunteer said the campaign did not have enough resources to answer our questions. I don't know what that means, either.
After our managing editor called and told someone at the campaign the mistake it was making, he was told there were not enough people or resources to answer the questions we submitted, which I reiterate was only five.
I called after that and was told we weren't allowed to call the office anymore, followed by the man I talked to hanging up on me in the middle of a sentence.
Our news editor then went Downtown to the campaign office, where the doors to the First Plaza building that houses Wilson's headquarters were locked. After calling the headquarters again, the same volunteer who all three of us talked to demanded that our news editor stop calling and harassing the headquarters. Then he was told that he wouldn't be allowed to conduct a five-minute interview with a campaign manager in order to fill out the questions we needed answered.
Madrid's campaign was the opposite. Nice on the phone Sunday, the volunteers promised to answer our five questions. As the day dragged on, several more calls yielded the same response until a volunteer finally transferred us to the voice mail of Madrid's campaign manager, Heather Brewer, after refusing to give us Brewer's cell phone number. Luckily, Brewer's voice mail had her cell phone number on it. Unluckily, her cell phone was turned off every time we called. Three calls, a voice mail and a text message were not returned.
It was reiterated several times to both campaigns that we publish 10,800 papers daily, and that our Web site gets about 7,500 hits per day. That's 18,300 potential voters. An Albuquerque Journal poll Sunday showed that Madrid is up on Wilson by 4 percentage points. Those 18,300 potential votes don't seem so insignificant anymore.
Not to mention it takes longer to vote than it would for the campaigns to answer our five questions.
So, how much do students actually matter to either candidate? Better yet, why should they? About 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in the 2004 election, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and that was a presidential election. That's why they don't care, and now you have concrete evidence that they don't.
You want to change that? I think you know what to do today.
Riley Bauling
Editor in chief
