Jennifer Lawless '97 remembers SSCI 104.
In the mid 1990s, Lawless was a student in the classroom on the first floor of the Social Sciences Building. During a lecture for the Pizza & Politics series delivered Monday in that classroom, the former student took the podium.
Lawless, now a political science professor at Brown University, discussed the emotion of a losing campaign, learning to raise money and a second possible run for office. In 2006, Lawless lost a bid to unseat a popular incumbent in the Democratic primary for Rhode Island's 2nd Congressional District.
“I certainly would not write off another run. It was by far the most important thing I have ever done in my life. It was also the most exciting thing I have ever done,” Lawless said.
In the summer of 2006, Lawless, 31, ran an aggressive campaign against incumbent Jim Langevin to earn the Democratic nomination in the race for one of two Rhode Island seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. With a staff largely made up of Brown graduates and students, Lawless piloted the campaign and, after some early difficulty, raised $400,000.
Lawless earned 39 percent of the primary vote on Sept. 12, 2006, and admitted to listeners at Union on Monday that she still wishes it had been a winning 51 percent.
“It was a very strange feeling to walk into a room full of about 150 people and TV cameras and they are all crying. They were all upset and I had to make them feel better about it,” Lawless said of election night.
Union College Professor Richard Fox, a handful of other faculty and about 20 students attended the lecture. Lawless told listeners about spending eight to nine hours a day phoning potential donors to ask for donations ranging up to $2,100.
“I thought I would easily raise $200,000 in the first month because I had listed all the people who I knew who would contribute,” Lawless said. “In the abstract, raising $500,000 isn't that difficult; it turned out that raising $500 took months.”
Lawless was a political science major at Union and salutatorian of her class before earning a doctorate of political science from Stanford Univerity in 2003. She collaborated with Fox on a recent book called “It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office.” The pair is working on a follow-up study focusing on what factors drive people to run for office.