With student government elections approaching on Feb. 25 and 26, Change, Vision and Watch Party officials have spent the month of February rolling out their platforms on social media and spreading the word across campus.
Vision Party, which holds the Student Senate majority, is aiming to improve student mental health and tackle food insecurity on campus. Change Party candidates, meanwhile, highlighted issues such as graduate student housing shortages and restoring Marston Science Library’s 24/7 model. The Watch Party, an emerging third party option, is pushing for fairer elections.
The election will determine UF’s new student body president, vice president and treasurer, in addition to 50 of the 100 seats representing the university’s 16 colleges in the Student Senate. Each senator serves a one-year term, shaping policies impacting campus life, student resources and funding allocation.
Vision Party
Major points within the Vision platform include integrating more mental health resources for students and tackling food insecurity.
The Vision executive ticket is composed of Senate President Blake Cox, who is running for student body president; Jade Gonzalez, the vice presidential candidate and current junior class vice president; and Johanna Moncy, the party’s treasurer candidate and current deputy chief of staff for the student body vice president.
During the Spring 2025 Debate Feb. 10, Cox said he and the other members of the Vision ticket would work to expand mental health resources. According to the CWC’s Annual Wellness Report, more student patients at intake reported levels of sadness and depression, difficulty concentrating and social anxiety in 2024 compared to the previous year.
Vision also plans to develop events addressing loneliness and mental health and work alongside the UF Quest Department to implement a mental health day. To address food insecurity on campus, the party is also developing an initiative called Food for Fitness, which would allow students to exchange food donations for a guest RecSports pass.
“I just love this place and I want to give back to it, because it was my dream school,” Cox said.
Change Party
Change Party, which currently holds a one-fifth minority in the Student Senate, announced a 70-point list of policy goals on social media Feb 11. The proposals range from supporting marginalized groups on campus, expanding transportation initiatives, creating a sustainable rent relief program for graduate students and reforming SG’s transparency by publishing detailed financial reports.
Joaquin Marcelino, Change’s vice presidential candidate, said they want to get rid of “a lot of bureaucracy” and “wasteful spending.” They said SG should leverage its $24 -million budget to revive UF’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which UF eliminated last year to comply with a new state law.
Max Banach, the current senate minority party leader and Change’s treasurer candidate, said funds should be reallocated from SG-ran organizations such as the ACCENT Speakers Bureau and Student Government Productions to student organizations.
Reinforcing support for graduate student housing and supplying a rent relief program is something of dire need for the graduate student population, Banach said.
“It’s a very strong thing that people are most in need of when it comes to how low… the wages that students are able to bring in relative to the rising housing crisis in the Gainesville market,” Banach said.
Change is also pushing for improvements of pedestrian safety, advocating for lowering parking citation costs and further transparency of the Gainesville Regional Transit System’s agreement with UF administration. In April 2024, UF proposed to cut the funding for RTS in half, but the university has since agreed to maintain current funding levels through 2025.
Watch Party
Watch Party, a recently formed third party focused on fair elections, is running its first executive ticket. The party ran its first slate of candidates for the Student Senate in the Fall semester but didn’t win any seats.
Alfredo Ortiz, a longtime SG official and Watch Party’s presidential candidate, said he and his running mate Ajay Pooran aim to reverse the Fall 2023 redistricting of the election map. He argued that one of the largest issues with the current at-large model of the election map is the elimination of representation of off-campus seats within District D.
The at-large map combined the historically minority party-voting District D, which held 12 seats for student senate, with districts A, B and E, which historically vote for the majority party, and Ddistrict C which has leaned to either party in the past.
The party plans to reinstate five student senate seats for District D and establish voting locations on UF satellite campuses, the party platform stated on its Instagram account.
The party additionally promised a $250 campaign funding minimum for all parties running in elections to avoid independent parties facing monetary disadvantages.
“What this platform communicates is that we don’t care about whether or not you are left- or right-wing; we don’t care if you are Vision or Change,” Ortiz said. “We care about protecting the integrity and legitimacy of the electoral process that these other two parties depend on.”
Contact Michael Angee at mangee@alligator.org. Follow him on X at @michaelangee.
