Last Tuesday night was interesting. After the last Student Government election, as is the norm, the new Senate elected new Senate leadership.
There were two members-at-large seats up for grabs. Those folks serve on the Replacement and Agenda committee and help interview and vote on people who apply for Senate seats or committee seats.
Additionally, there are elections for the Senate President and the Senate President Pro Tempore positions. These are the top two spots in Senate leadership and these two positions are also some of the few within Student Government that come with compensation.
But none of that was really on my mind last Tuesday. What I was looking for was to see who the majority party would nominate to run for Senate President. This wasn’t because I was concerned about who I would be running against (I was the minority party’s nominee for Senate President), but because I was really curious about who would be the majority party’s nominee for the next Student Body President.
I have been gossiping about this for months with people on both sides of the aisle. It’s a bit of an open secret within our circles, that whoever is the Senate President for Fall usually goes on to be nominated to run for Student Body President in Spring.
If you’re elected Senate President in Spring, that’s rough, buddy. You tried. Enjoy obscurity.
But yeah, with some advanced googling, I figured out that out of the last 11 Student Body Presidents, eight of them have served as the Senate President at some point in time. All were elected in Fall.
This is including the one vice president who stepped up after the then-president resigned and also the one year the minority party won the executive ticket, so it’s actually a much tighter correlation than it already seems. The majority party presidential candidate who lost in 2015 also “happened to be” a Senate President elected in the fall.
I don’t mean to suggest that there’s a path of things you have to do and positions you need to receive in order to be nominated, but there’s also another step prior to becoming the Senate President: being the chair of the Budget and Appropriations committee in the Senate.
Now there’s a handy PDF on the Student Government website that lists out all the old Student Body Presidents and another for Senate Presidents, so that was helpful, but to figure out who has served as the budget chair years ago, one has to get a bit more creative.
After scouring many Alligator articles, old bills and LinkedIn (since some people really can’t let go of SG, myself included), I had more or less determined that out of the last 11 Student Body Presidents, six served as the chair of the Senate budget committee prior to becoming Senate President. Out of the last three Student Body Presidents, all three followed the same path (and I might add that two of them actually went to the same high school, which is really not even weird at this point).
But the three-year streak came to an end when the current budget chair wasn’t nominated for any leadership positions at all this past Tuesday. So ends a three-year tradition there, though I doubt many outside observers noticed.
Now, I love a little bit of drama and mystery, so I was all about it. What happened? Some backroom deal gone wrong? The natural variation of life? Maybe the chair just didn’t want to become Student Body President so someone else stepped up. The part that sucks about me writing these columns is that I am an outsider to this process as well. Who knows who else ran for their party’s nomination for the spots?
Now that the nominations were out of the way, I relaxed a little bit. Sure, I was running for Senate President, but the majority party had a supermajority in the Senate, so I had no chance. But still, an election for a paid position in Student Government probably shouldn’t go uncontested. At the very worst, it was 10 minutes of me talking about improvements and other changes I would like to enact to make the Senate a more productive, inclusive place.
For I, too, am not the biggest fan of some old traditions.
Zachariah Chou is a UF political science junior and Murphree Area Senator. His column appears on Fridays.
