Senior Adam Stromme won the AP government election in Ms. Shoe-Corrigan’s class on Friday, March 7th, with senior Habon Ali as his running mate. After two weeks of hard work, the mock election process came to an end.

The project consisted of many parts to help students learn more about the United States government system. The class split into Republican and Democratic parties and chose candidates to represent them. The Republican party chose Adam Stromme as the presidential candidate and Habon Ali as his vice-president. The Democratic Party chose Ryan Lowder to run as presidential candidate and Marshall Mueller as her vice-president.

After they chose a candidate, they created a political platform and advertised to promote and raise money for their party. They also put together a commercial which was seen at the end of Eagan AM on March 6th.The idea was to recreate how the political process would be in the real world.

Ms. Shoe-Corrigan, the teacher for the AP government class, explains the biggest goal of hers for the project, “I want to get them engaged in the political process and get them to be active citizens. Many of them are 18 or close to 18 so i also wanted to plant the seed in their head that they could run for public office.”

This project didn’t come without its challenges. Both the republican and democrat parties had problems to face. “When running republican in a unionized school and all voters are the youth, you need an interesting spin on what the republican party is all about and rather than old school conservatism.” explained Stromme, “We were about individual rights and liberties. Putting that in words that are both accessible and persuasive is very difficult.”

For Lowder, the hardest part was, “that the whole class split in half. It turned into a bitter competition and I don’t like that.”

Despite the difficult parts, both candidates learned a lot from the project. Lowder learned about the power of communication in this project, “I learned how much you can influence what’s going on around the school just by putting up posters and stuff like that. My favorite part was that we made teenagers care about the political process and normally teens don’t.” Similarly, Stromme learned that communication within his party was very important.