We set out for Florida from the District of Columbia on Friday, determined to be the deciding factor in the Florida Presidential Primary: two buses loaded with Romney supporters brimming with promise and confidence made the 19 hour over night sojourn down through the Mid-Atlantic and into the South. This, like many political trips, was organized on a shoe string and on short notice: a week before we set out, a Facebook posting from a person I’d never met alerted DC-area Romney supporters to the opportunity, and I scrambled to put together a team from our newly minted Students for Mitt chapter on CUA’s campus. After a couple of days of lobbying and pleading, five volunteers representing the CUA dove into the unknown.

We arrived in West Palm Beach to a central campaign office located in what used to be a storefront youth clothing retailer — it had seen several transformations befitting of any campaign office. The outlets were packed with extender pads for phone chargers, most space was occupied by tables and chairs, around and in which volunteers would sit to make phone call goals and try to get in touch with voters to secure their support using scripted statements to voters. The dressing rooms were occupied by Romney materials that were destined for the streets, homes, yards, bumpers, shirts, heads, and bodies of supporters.  Stock rooms in the back had been filled with tables and chairs to make ad hoc offices for the officials directing the volunteers in this store.

Our journey didn’t end there; there was an even more outlying office in Coral Springs, and with two George Mason students we saddled up into a blue rental car and made the hour long trip South, toward Miami. We arrived in the most unusual of spaces, this campaign office had been transformed from a hotel suite into a local nerve center with sixteen phones in its bank and support and contact services for about half a million voters. When we arrived, we set right to work calling locals and letting them know that we wanted to earn their support in the Primary contest only a short three days away. We burned up the phone lines the first two days, making more than 6,000 personal contacts via phone, but the work was difficult: it required us to sit for some 9 hours in a small hotel room and try and persuade sometimes openly hostile people to vote for a man that we all believed in, a man for whom we’d sacrificed class absences, labor, and time. The phone banking made up the bulk of our work, but as is the case with most college engagements, we made time for fun. We made a trip to the beach and ate at a beach side restaurant, and I stepped in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in my life. A note must be made about our accommodations: four of the Magnificent Seven were staying in a local supporters home, while the other three (myself included) slept in pull out couch beds in the hotel office, our meals were provided by a local supporter and at times we had to survive on soda and gold fish crackers while we put our shoulders to the wheel. The night before the election came, we spent the last three hours of the night and the first hour of the next day canvassing Coral Springs and surrounding areas with Romney signs, making sure that others who stopped at major intersections knew that Romney was in town and today was the day to vote for him.

We returned the next morning fresh to make calls and head out to polling locations, and we did diligently throughout the day. Exit polls and rumors of internal polls raised our moods and made us hopeful: the earliest polls from Naples and the panhandle showed Romney in a landslide, and it turned out to be true in Naples, an area into which we made many phone calls. Later that night, however, our spirits were significantly dampened by the returns, especially as the night grew on. We boarded a bus back to DC just after the election was called for McCain, and I reflected on the loss.

It was the first time in my life that I’d been behind a candidate who was wounded in a major way, and for whom I thought hope was scarce. I spent the last days of my life putting all of the energy and will I had into his success, and attached myself deeply to him and his victory, it was a reflection on me, and it hadn’t ended well at all. We were hit hard, and the opposition stood before us looming with a height heretofore unseen in the campaign season. The next morning I woke up in a considerably better mood, and my mind had in its rest rededicated itself to winning or to dying on this hill, standing next to the candidate who had inspired me to act, next to the man in whom I had faith and in whom I also believed. I was going to move forward, come what may. I listened to the Springsteen song No Surrender, and felt very good about the upcoming days. I’m finalizing a Students for Romney fund raiser at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and trying to shore up his support there in the straw poll. I’ve also recruited several more people to our cause in the interim, and am attending the DC GOP’s Lincoln Day Dinner with several other Romney supporters in hopes of casting winning ballots for Romney in the night’s straw poll. I’m keeping hope alive.