So who's going to win the SUSU Elections? [PREDICTIONS]

Voting opened at around 3pm yesterday for students to vote in the SUSU Elections. Traditionally most people vote on the first day, so chances are there’s a select few people who basically already know who’s won.

At The Tab we’ve been very involved in the Elections and know most of the candidates, so we thought we’d make our predictions as to who might win.

President

This is a tough race. Jess Staff has got the biggest campaign team by a long way, but Jazz and Charlotte have strong campaigns as well. Jazz has also come out with some fantastic campaign videos, while Jess’s videos have been more of the basic “why I’m voting for Jess” type.

We reckon Jess and Jazz definitely stand out from the crowd, with Charlotte closely following. For this reason we think:

• Jess and Jazz will tie, with exactly the same number of votes each
• Charlotte will follow about 300 votes behind

Apparently when a vote is tied, the Union Council Chair James Miles will get to decide who gets the role. Talk about pressure.

Oh – and Derek will probably do a lot better than everyone thinks.

VP Academic Affairs

This was less of a hard one to decide. We reckon Sasha Watson stands out by far, in both charisma and number of people who know him. He really knows his stuff as well.

VP Communications

This is a very tricky one. If you didn’t know – it’s the head of every media department that’s running. If it was ever possible to make a comparison between the SUSU Elections and the four elements water, earth, wind and fire, the competition for this candidate would be it. After much thought, we’ve decided on which element goes with each candidate:

• Daniel Webb: Fire
• Joe Mclo: Water
• Dax Wood: Earth
• Hayley Taulbut: Wind

We’ll let you use your imagination to work out how we came up with each.

Fire is by far the coolest element, so we’ll have to pick Dan. He also spoke fantastically at Hustings, is very well known for the fantastic job he’s done with the Wessex Scene this year. Very hard to call this one.

VP Sports Development

There hasn’t been one specific candidate who’s stood out here. Dean has been running a fantastic campaign with his ‘Dean Giant’ slogan. How he got certain posters up in some places we have no idea…. he really must be a giant.

Johnny, on the other hand, is playing heavily off the ‘Fresh Prince’ idea. And EVERYBODY loves the Fresh Prince. He also has a beautiful smile. And smiles win votes.

We reckon it’ll be a close race, with Johnny coming up just on top.

VP Student Engagement

If you’ve seen Smurfs wandering around everywhere – that’ll be Shane’s campaign team. He’s done a fantastic job campaigning with a great sized team. Definitely one of the front runners.

Daz is also very popular as well, and he’s quite tall so we’re afraid to say a bad word about him.

Adam Moloney – he’s a fresher, which is admirable. It’s not often a fresher runs in the SUSU Elections. However, every candidate learns a lot over the course of their time here, and we reckon Adam needs to give it a year or two before going for it. He’ll likely get a good number of votes, but probably won’t be the winner.

Akhil… well he has a beautiful smile. See above.

We reckon that Shane probably stands out the most here, and will probably win by a few hundred votes.

VP Welfare & Communities

Emily Eldridge has been by far the most charismatic of the Welfare candidates, the others have great manifestos and ideas, but it’s the person who wins an election, not the manifesto.

None of the Welfare candidates have had a huge campaign team, so it’s difficult to make a judgement here, but Emily definitely stands out from the crowd.

VP Winchester & Sites

Every single Tab writer comes from the main Southampton campus, so this isn’t exactly an easy one for us. At a guess though – we’d say Joe Ellis. Purely because it’s the name we’ve heard the most. And he’s got this incredible video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tv7fvVL-CE