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By Joe Arney
Photos by Arielle Wiedenbeck

In sports, it’s often said, offense wins games, but defense wins championships. 
  
For Cody Walizer, when it comes to politics, that’s inverted—good defense can win a debate, but it’s offense that wins elections. And that’s unusual because of how little time candidates spend on offense when they are sparring onstage. 

“When someone has an opportunity to build, to go on the offense, but choose to play defense, that’s a bad sign for their position,” Walizer, an assistant teaching professor of communication in the College of Media, Communication and Information, said. “It’s also a sign maybe they’re trying to play these political games, as opposed to being a good debater.” 

Walizer was one of nearly a dozen panelists speaking at a voter engagement fair put on by CMCI, CU Student Government and the Office of the Chancellor, in association with CU Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs. �鶹��Ƶ 150 students attended on Tuesday night to ask questions about politics and elections, register to vote, and learn how to become involved in local elections. 

Walizer was invited to participate because of his expertise in debate. He captained his high school debate team and has extensive experience coaching debaters, and said, “I can very firmly state that I have never seen a presidential or vice presidential debate that was a good debate.” 

That’s because politicians rarely play offense, which Walizer described as constructing arguments and showing why your side is right. Instead, they play defense—deconstructing arguments and saying why the other side is wrong. 

Three panels answered questions submitted by students ahead of time, which covered issues such as the role social media plays in political messaging, how ideology plays out with voters, and how students can involve themselves and help ensure electoral integrity. 

Not taking sides

Leah Sprain, an associate professor of communication and director of the university’s Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement, co-moderated the event and frequently praised the quality of questions that students contributed.  

Sprain studies democratic engagement, particularly how to  support the ways people come together to make decisions on public issues—enabling participation, designing better meetings or rethinking civic norms. When she has worked to help other groups structure their meetings more effectively, she found participants may assume more knowledge about a particular issue than they actually possess. 

“They wanted to hear more about how this election would have consequences throughout their lives,” Sprain said. “They were asking about how to make sense of politics, versus just taking sides on issues. That surprised me.” 

Of nearly 200 student registrants, dozens submitted questions, “which is a proportion of interest you don’t typically see, especially when some people are registering for things like extra course credit.” 

Some of the liveliest discussion concerned social media’s capacity for good and harm, through generative artificial intelligence, advertising and the like. Sandra Ristovska, associate professor of media studies, and Alex Siegel, associate professor of political science, said elections have always been shaped by new technologies. Siegel said the railroad and telegraph helped create a national audience for Abraham Lincoln by offering more timely coverage of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. 

Bogus content isn’t new, Ristovska said, and recent research suggests we’re good at not letting it influence how we vote, but in India’s elections earlier this year, “deepfakes did contribute to sexual harassment of women, the intimidation of journalists and the intimidation of human rights activists in the country,” she said. “We need to be paying more attention to those things.” 

Michaele Ferguson, an associate professor of political science, talked about an essay she has students write at the start of her undergraduate course on modern ideologies. Each student describes his or her ideology; she consistently finds students support a mix of free-market economics and social justice issues, like reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. 

That’s not a coalition you typically see in the United States, she said, as those issues are claimed, respectively, by the right and left of the spectrum. Ferguson said she’s intrigued by Vice President Kamala Harris’ attempt to signal support for both camps “as a way to peel away voters who would otherwise sit out elections or vote Republican.”

“It’s really exciting to me to see her doing the very thing that my class exercise would tell you is the strategy to win an election in the United States.”

Other presenters included Chuck Plunkett, director of CU News Corps; Toby Hopp, associate professor of advertising; Patrick Deneen, a visiting scholar at the university’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization; Molly Fitzpatrick (PolSci’11), Boulder County clerk; and junior Grace Covney, a tri-executive with CU Student Government.   

Learning to lead through government

Tyler Rowan, another CUSG tri-executive and a junior studying international affairs, said he hoped the energy of the room translated into active participants in the election. 

He got into student government not for partisan reasons, he said, but because “I wanted to make the most out of school and learn how to lead. Student government has taught me that—it’s taken a majority of my time, but I’m very passionate about it and it’s the best decision I ever made.” 

That youthful energy was exciting for Walizer to see, as well. 

“The emotional intelligence students need to have to be asking things about how do I engage in politics in a way that’s healthy, how do I have conversations with my roommates in a way that’s respectful—those are not things I’ve seen asked in a situation like this before,” he said. 

In addition to being open to all CU Boulder students, the discussion was livestreamed to audiences at Colorado Mesa University, in Grand Junction, and Fort Lewis College, in Durango. It was followed by a live viewing of the vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz.

Lori Bergen, founding dean of CMCI, kicked off the event by encouraging students to seek out difficult conversations as a way to learn and grow. 

“On our campus, we really are in a place where difficult conversations can and should occur,” Bergen said. “When we approach those with courage and curiosity and care and consistency, that’s when learning and growth and progress really happen.”