Senior Rob Hoffman has always been interested in politics, but it wasn’t until this year that he was given the opportunity to take this enthusiasm into the real world of political candidacy by working as Melissa Blaustein’s campaign manager for Sausalito city council.
Hoffman first met Blaustein at “Jazz by the Bay,” a jazz and blues festival in Sausalito, when his mom, former Sausalito Mayor Jill Hoffman, suggested he might be interested in speaking with her.
“We hit it off talking about politics because she does work in international advocacy as her day job,” Hoffman said. “We basically talked about local politics and also the recent French election because she has a masters in public policy.”
Hoffman proceeded to offer Blaustein his help on her campaign for Sausalito city council, adding that he knew of some students, including Tamiscal senior Liliana Amador, who would potentially be interested in working for the campaign as well.
Amador’s previous political experience, both working on campaigns and attending conferences, made her a good candidate for a position on Blaustein’s campaign.
“I had just gotten back from a political leadership conference in Washington D.C. and my friend Rob, who I knew from JSA, texted me and said he had a really great opportunity for me and would I be interested in working on a city council campaign,” Amador said.
While Hoffman worked with other students involved in Blaustein’s campaign, including volunteers Vicens Vila and Kate Theriault, much of his responsibilities as campaign manager included working with outside political consultants Blaustein has hired for the campaign.
“We developed a field plan on how we were going to attack the vote basically, and developed a strategy,” Hoffman said. “One of these consultants is very adept at statistical analysis and stuff like that, so I’ve been working with him a lot.”
In addition to working with these experts, Hoffman oversaw much of the day-to-day work of the campaign, while Amador focused on a variety of other aspects of the campaign in her role as field director. On a larger campaign, her work would include educating voters about the candidate and working on voter contact strategy while also executing campaign events, such as parties to help raise funds.
“Because we’re sort of a smaller campaign, it’s a city council election, I do a lot of that work, but I also just do a lot of stuff that maybe on a national campaign, volunteers would do,” Amador said.
Much of this volunteer work included knocking on doors on the weekends in an effort to attract voters.
“Every weekend we go door knocking, door to door, and just talk to people about Melissa, try to get people to support Melissa. When people say they like her, we ask them to put up yard signs,” Amador said.
While the basics of the voter outreach process was easy to manage, Hoffman experienced other difficulties due to his limited experience with political campaigns.
“I had some experience by virtue of my mom running for city council in 2014, so I had some background knowledge,” Hoffman said. “That’s basically the extent of my knowledge.”
Hoffman expressed particular difficulty in dealing with the campaign signs that promote Blaustein.
“Figuring out how we were going to get signs out was pretty complicated because I had limited bandwidth because I have school and also devoted all my spare time to how we were going to knock doors and canvas,” Hoffman said. “We had to figure out who was going to deliver signs and who was going to seek out contacts for where to put out signs, so eventually that got delegated elsewhere.”
However, some aspects of campaigning were easy for Hoffman to learn, specifically when it came to talking with potential voters and tailoring responses for different demographics.
“It’s not rocket science, but there’s definitely an art to it,” Hoffman said.
Despite previous experience before working on Blaustein’s campaign, Amador expressed the high level of learning this campaign provided her.
“I worked as a volunteer for Bernie Sanders in 2015 and over the summer, so I had some experience, but not a ton,” Amador said.
While Amador knew the basics of how a campaign is run, she had to do research on policies that could be implemented at a local level, something she had not had previous experience with.
Senior Angelica Vohland, the communications director for Blaustein’s campaign who heard about the campaign through Hoffman as well, also had political experience before obtaining this position.
“I actually ran my own campaign within JSA. I ran for speaker of the assembly, which is a regional position in the statewide area of California, and that gave me a lot of good background in terms of knowledge about campaigns, how to run a campaign, how to do all the design, how to organize a platform,” Vohland said.
According to Vohland, much of her work consisted of helping Blaustein get involved in the Sausalito community.
“Not only do we reach out to community members, but we attend a bunch of events. We recently helped out and volunteered at the Sausalito Art Festival,” Vohland said. “We were wearing our merchandise and everything to advocate for Melissa, but it was also nice to really reach out within the community and participate in a really awesome event and raise awareness for her campaign.”
Vohland also helped Blaustein write brief paragraphs for her platform, which required extensive amounts of research.
“I had to become extremely educated on the background of Sausalito—a lot of the logistical parts regarding businesses,tourism and traffic,” Vohland said.
Much of this research allowed Vohland to aid Blaustein in her policy, particularly when it came to the issues of bikers. Vohland explained one major problem as being bike rental places don’t make certain routes available to tourists, causing them higher numbers of these tourists to bike through Sausalito.
“We’ve done a lot of outreach to those businesses in terms of advising tourists that there are other places to go to try to reduce congestion within Sausalito on the weekends,” Vohland said.
Amador also expressed the thorough amount of research she compiled in order to fully understand the issues within the city of Sausalito, including reading a 150 page report on problems affecting the waterfront.
According to Amador, though she was previously unfamiliar with many of these issues affecting the waterfront in Sausalito, a lot of the things that are impacting the city are happening at a global level as well.
“Climate change is something that’s really real. It’s a small waterfront community, so not only is the sea level rising, but there’s areas of Sausalito where things have been built on filler, so all of that is eroding and the sea level is rising it’s causing a lot of flooding,” Amador said.
Hoffman, Amador and Vohland have all been interested in politics before this campaign. Hoffman has been attracted to politics for as long as he can remember, one of his oldest memories being the reelection of Bush.
Amador cites middle school as the time her interest in politics was sparked.
“Politics has just always been a big part of my life,” Amador said. “I guess I’m just passionate about all the issues that are decided politically, and I have a lot of faith in the ability of our government to get things done.”
According to Hoffman, he had previously tried to get involved in other campaigns at a local level, but it never worked out.
“I had tried and failed to try to get involved in the Kamala Harris campaign and the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Hoffman said. “Then this opportunity just happened to come by me and I didn’t pass it up.”
Hoffman’s biggest takeaway from this experience is the need to truly be enthusiastic about the work being done.
“You really have to love what you’re doing in politics, otherwise it’s just miserable. The only way that you’re going to get through the campaign is by liking the people that are around you and believing in the same thing,” Hoffman said. “If I hated the people that I’m working with, I would have quit in August.”
Part of this is due to the large amount of time necessary to run a campaign.
“I ran the numbers and I probably spend around 35 hours a week on the campaign if you factor in everything. With door knocking, doing stuff on the computer, going to events, stuff like that, anywhere from 25-35 hours a week,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman, Amador and Vohland all have hopes for future involvement in politics beyond Blaustein’s campaign.
“I definitely think I’ll pursue a future in politics. To what that ends up being, I don’t know,” Hoffman said. “It’s probably not going to be on the local level. It’s kind of exhausting, physically and emotionally, because you’re dealing with a lot of personalities, I think more so than you would on a larger campaign because most interactions you’re going to have on a national campaign are internal, whereas the vast majority of what we’re doing is out in the community and engaging with people.”
According to Amador, the experience of working on Blaustein’s campaign was very helpful for her in terms of her potential future careers.
“This is something that I want to do for a career—if I don’t run myself, then I want to be a campaign staffer,” Amador said.
Vohland wants to have a future in politics in whatever form that may be.
“I would love to be able to manage and run my own campaign for a regional or countywide candidacy. I hope to go into politics at some point in my life, whether on a county level or a statewide level,” Vohland said.
Hoffman cites the people of Sausalito as being one of the most memorable aspects of working on Blaustein’s campaign.
“Sausalito’s very unique in its culture and community, and so it’s been fun to go out and see that and just meet interesting people,” Hoffman said.
Vohland was also appreciative of the opportunity to engage in the Sausalito community.
“I think really being able to get out and talk to people in the community is the most important and essential aspect of running a campaign because you get your face out there and you get your ideas out there,” Vohland said.