SBP Bradley Opere’s campaign team tells us what it takes to win

Unless you live under a rock, you know last week was election week for the 2016-2017 Student Body President at UNC. Three candidates – John Taylor, Wilson Sink and Bradley Opere – led large and successful campaigns that were extremely visible and mobile on campus.

As the fog cleared on Tuesday night, Bradley Opere’s name was announced as the next Student Body President. Laughter rang out, tears were shed and a spontaneous dance party broke out in the Union.

A couple days later, after everyone had caught up on sleep, we sat down with junior Spencer Goodson, one of Bradley’s campaign managers, to see just how they pulled it off.

What was your reaction to the news that Bradley had won?

I think we were all running at that point on about half an hour of sleep the last four or five days, so we had to triple check the news. But the second I heard, I got this feeling that I’ve never really experienced before.

The entire campaign team has really become such a family and we all embraced in a dog pile. It was a moment of real retrospect as the last six months just passed before our eyes. The blood, sweat and tears that we had poured into the campaign finally came to fruition and it was an incredible moment.

The last five Student Body Presidents were elected in a runoff, so were you surprised Bradley won without going to a runoff?

With it being so unprecedented within the history of the race, I think it was a little shocking, especially considering the caliber of the candidates we were up against. They all had very strong roots within different organizations on campus, and so we kind of knew what we were going up against. But at the same time, I had such faith in Bradley.

If you’ve ever met him, you’ll be able to see the depth of his character immediately and you know that people really resonate with that. I can’t say I ever lost confidence in our campaign, and I knew from the day before – when we exploded in our public space and social media outreach, when people I had never met were letting me know they voted for Bradley – that we were doing something special.

Without spilling any secrets, what made your campaign so successful?

In the movie “The War Room,” Bill Clinton’s campaign – sorry, I’m kind of a political junkie – is led by a guy named James Carville who says when he’s addressing the team the night before the election: “After love, the most important thing you can give somebody is labor.”

I think that was something that rang through this campaign. Because people were so committed to the candidate and the campaign, our labor and love combined to create a powerhouse.

All that said, would you have done anything differently?

There were definitely some major stumbling points and several nights when we had to sit at Bradley’s at 2am in the morning and think, “What are we not doing right?” It’s easy to look back and be like, “oh, we could have done this better,” or, “we could have done that better.” But as Bradley put it, that’s what makes a good leader: to be able to hit stumbling points and still grow and progress.

I think that we could have done a lot of things differently, and the other candidates would have said the same thing about their campaigns, but ultimately I’m happy with the way things went and think the pitfalls only made us stronger.

So after all of this, what happens next?

Well, I actually got a text from Bradley at 10am yesterday morning asking me to compile a list of student organizations we already wanted to start building contact with. I texted him back saying: “All right Bradley, no days off!”

So that’s a testament to who he is, that he already wants us to continue to fight and start the outreach to make as much of a change in the upcoming year as possible. So I guess we’re meeting on Friday to figure out what we’re doing for the upcoming year.

What do you hope the student body takes away from this whole election process?

I guess the fact that this is their university and they make the decisions. Involvement in Student Government and involvement in the election season, you can see such a spectrum of care. All the campaigns represented people who care enough about the university to see it better for every person on it.

And every person on campus has the ability to share their voice and mold this university. In the upcoming year, I hope and know that’s something Bradley is going to achieve – making sure everyone knows that this is their university.

Spencer also recognized the hard work of Tony Asher, Joe Nail and Trip Andracchio on the campaign team and wanted to again congratulate John Taylor and Wilson Sink on running excellent campaigns. If Bradley is anything that Spencer hypes him up to be, the student body should be well represented by their president next year.