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An aspiring politician's first attempt at elected office came to an end in the suburbs of Lincoln, Sudbury, and Wayland, Mass. last Tuesday, as Stas Gayshan, BC '04, came up short in his first major political election.
In a hard-fought primary contest to see who will attempt to unseat incumbent state representative Sue Pope, Democratic voters picked Gayshan's more established rival John Thomas, a veteran Beacon Hill political aide, who garnered 1,322 votes to Gayshan's 851.
Gayshan, who describes himself as a fiscally responsible Democrat, won the majority of votes in the rural town of Lincoln, but fared worse in other, more populous areas of the district.
"We got a lot accomplished with very little," said Gayshan, who added that early problems getting the campaign up and running cut down on the face-to-face time he spent with voters. "Next time I'll have to work harder to make sure I am managing less and campaigning more," he said.
Although Gayshan failed to capture the nomination, he captured voters' fascination. Outside a polling station in Sudbury, numerous voters expressed surprise, and a certain sense of gratitude to Gayshan's campaign staff, at the youth he injected into a normally dormant political season.
In a precinct where Pope, a moderate Republican, has faced little opposition for two straight election cycles and voter turnout for state representative primaries rarely tops 10 percent, Gayshan's campaign was viewed by many locals as a breath of fresh air.
All summer, the former BC student leader focused on door-to-door campaigning in order to show potential voters that he planned to make a serious bid to challenge Thomas. "I am young, and so I had to meet voters in person to show them that I really do understand the fundamentally complex issues at stake," said Gayshan.
Under the leadership of two different campaign managers, Jessica Dewitt, A&S '05, and later Nyck Bernier, A&S '07, the campaign sent out multiple waves of mailings to residents and worked the phones from a small Sudbury office to pick out likely voters, who were then ranked on a scale of 1 to 4 in their attraction to Gayshan as a candidate.
Bernier said that many of the strategies the campaign adopted were based on the primary campaigns of congressional and senatorial candidates. In fact, many of Gayshan's aides met while volunteering for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), BC Law '76.
"I still think we ran the more professional campaign," said Bernier, who drove an hour from his home in Swansea each morning to head up the effort this summer. "We basically took the same strategies used by presidential campaigns and boiled them down to the local level." Gayshan marketed his youth as an asset for a State House filled with passive legislators and bureaucratic red tape. "Youth was our message," said Bernier. "Stas isn't from Beacon Hill, and he's proud that he hasn't worked on Beacon Hill."
Youth may have been the campaign's theme, but it may also have been its undoing. Many voters expressed concern over a perceived lack of experience."Youth was both a help and a hindrance. A great number of people thought that I wouldn't have the experience necessary to succeed in the legislature," acknowledged Gayshan. Although Gayshan ran on a platform tackling issues such as health care reform and the economic burden on the elderly, the ongoing gay marriage debate played a major part in his decision to run. Pope has been one of Gov. Mitt Romney's most ardent supporters in his pursuit of a ban on gay marriage. If defeated, Pope's current seat could provide a much-needed boost to House Democrats.
Despite the loss, Gayshan said that his political hopes have not faded. Until November, he will campaign for Kerry and other local Democratic candidates, including Thomas, his former opponent. "I'm not leaving politics - that's certain. I really want to focus on getting other young people involved in political activism, both before and after the election," he said.
Gayshan and his family emigrated from Uzbekistan to escape ethnic and religious persecution. He graduated from BC last year after serving in the UGBC Senate, and leading the BC chapter of College Democrats during a period of unprecedented membership growth.
Camera crews recently filmed Gayshan and his college-aged volunteer corps for a possible television documentary.
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