A few days ago, The Ubyssey published an editorial disendorsing every single presidential candidate. We don’t take these things lightly — but based on the intangibility of the platforms, the collective lack of experience and the underperformance at debates, we felt comfortable telling voting students that they really had “no good options.”
We have since decided to remove our disendorsement of one candidate. It should be noted that this is not equivalent to an endorsement.
When it came to disendorsing one of the campaigns — that of the Cairn — the main reasoning was that we simply couldn’t endorse a campaign without a viable platform behind it. No matter the experience of the student behind the joke, the lack of a platform would have been a vote for unaccountability within the AMS.
But on Tuesday, Alan Ehrenholz announced that he was stepping out from behind the Cairn and running for real after seeming undecided at the Great Debate, even releasing a multi-point platform along with this announcement. (We still wish that he had done this from the very beginning of the race.)
The platform is promising and tangible, and Ehrenholz has the qualifications to back it up. But it should not be ignored that he spent half of the campaigning period speaking in the third person on behalf of the Cairn, leaving students without some key opportunities to constructively engage with and question him as a real candidate.
To be clear: this is not an endorsement. But we could not continue to lump Ehrenholz in with the rest of this year’s presidential candidates, all of whom we still think are unsuitable to be the next AMS president.