How to win (and lose) a Students’ Union General Election
By Matthew Johnson, February 23 2026—
“Shake my hand,” I said while extending my hand out to my sister. “We just formed the committee to get me elected Students’ Union president.”
It was Nov. 28th, 2024. It was cold and snowing, and we were in the parking lot outside of the apartments we lived in.
There is no committee you form when you run for the Students’ Union (SU), I had a flair for the dramatics and truthfully had just finished re-watching The West Wing. I thought it sounded good, and I really wanted my sister to join me as my campaign manager.
You may not know it yet, but the campaign for the next Student Legislative Council (SLC) has already started. Potential candidates were hard at work, collecting the required signatures to get on the ballot.
No, this article does not look to re-litigate the campaign I ran. I have no more elections in me to run. This is to share with everyone a bit of the “inside baseball” of what running is like to actually run, what you may learn to do, and maybe what not to do.
Either way, I’m laying all my cards on the table.
It all starts when you begin to “declare intent” by collecting signatures to run for a position and get on the ballot. You need to collect 150 signatures to get on the ballot for the executive team. My favourite fact I shared with students is that the required amount of signatures is “50 more” than to run for Mayor of Calgary.
I created a graphic on Canva with a QR code linking to the nomination website on it and began walking around the University with my iPad, talking to people.
“Hey, can I steal two minutes of your time?” I would ask every single person I walked up to, hoping I could hit the magic number. This stage of the election is practically rejection therapy, if you weren’t sure about what it would take to break out of your comfort zone, you do now.
Word spreads quickly. By the end of the first day of collecting signatures, I began receiving text messages and phone calls, all asking the same question: “Is it true? Are you running?”
The hard lesson learned here was to not be coy. Don’t let it be a surprise for your friends and colleagues, they are there to support you along the way.
Sometimes those conversations you don’t have turn into regret, perhaps even resentment. It was certainly a mistakeI would not want to make again, but one I will have to live with.
When I showed up to the SLC chambers one Tuesday evening, you begin to wonder if there are eyes on you, and perhaps there are a couple.
It doesn’t help that before I showed up, I had heard horror stories of the campaign trail, of whisper campaigns, of things being dug up from the past.
Perhaps these stories are just that, stories. Or perhaps I was simply lucky, as I did not have that experience at all.
Everyone has their hackles in the lead up to day one of the campaign. Even when you have absolutely no reason to be suspicious of others, that instinct still kicks in. I wish I could say I wasn’t guilty of this, but I was just the same.
In moments like this, a support system to seek out support and receive wise counsel from is of the utmost importance.
For me, that was my sister, Abbi. She was my campaign manager and the one that kept me focused. She made sure I never lost sight of why I was running. During my campaign, she was not just my sister. She was my communications director, my consiglierie, my coach.She wore every single hat.
This wasn’t some massive operation, it was a team of two against the world.
Truthfully, there are not enough hours in a day, or even days in a week, to mentally prepare yourself for the campaign.
You will spend time away from friends and family, you won’t have a reading break. Time not studying will be time making sure you have content ready, or campaigning, or strategizing. It becomes all consuming.
When you actually begin campaigning, no one tells you about the overwhelming anxiety you feel throughout the action-packed two weeks.
You’re talking to classes, sometimes packed lecture halls, sometimes empty rooms with students scattered around.
You begin to think in numbers and statistics, in catchy one-liners rather than complete sentences.
There are small technical elements during the campaign that helped a lot, some that I wish I had utilized more.
The campaign is, at its core, about name recognition. If you’re starting as a new candidate and not an “incumbent” (this is a broad term in a student election), you are starting at a disadvantage.
One way in getting your name out there is through classroom talks, which are encouraged by the SU. However, the real trick is mail merge. By building out a list of every single class you wish to speak to in Excel and creating a template requesting speaking time in each lecture, you can save a lot of time doing outreach.
The same should be done for the list of clubs to reach out and ask for their endorsement.
Mail merge is a small detail widely known among those who have run campaigns before, but is rarely shared with those on the outside.
Our goal was to hit all, or nearly all,single faculty at the University, a strategy we dubbed “the 50-state strategy,” a reference to the same strategy that was developed in the U.S. presidential campaign.
The other thing I should have considered was creating a “war room,” where you gather friends and reach out to as many people as possible to encourage them to vote. While it is a fantastic idea, doing this with a team of two is nearly impossible.
When printing posters, you quickly realize the limited budget of SU campaign funds is a difficult constraint. The most guarded secret, oddly enough, is that all candidates use Little Rock Printing (using the discount code: NONPROFIT25) to make printing more affordable.
Putting up posters becomes a race to get to your spot earlier than anyone else. Stand in front of your wall, check your watch religiously, and hang up your banners and posters before your opponent can take your spot.
We decided to grab two posters and place them on a large stick in my backpack, roaming all over campus. Students would look up and then follow it down to see me. I always found the dichotomy of such a large stick coming out of the backpack of such a small person funny.
During the campaign, eating becomes an afterthought. You develop a diet of whatever is cheap and quick at Mac Hall.
I even found that by the end of the campaign, I had lost a few pounds, between the smaller meals and running all over campus.
There even comes a point where a difficult decision is made: to go or not to go to class. I would find myself choosing the latter, sometimes even leaving in the middle of class to do a class talk, speak to students, and then rush back to keep taking notes in the class I was supposed to be in.
You’re on campus early into the day and late into the night. There is nothing quite like campus at 10:30 p.m., it feels a bit eerie and difficult to remain cheerful in.
But you’re reminded of what made you fall in love with the university in the first place.
The people.
You meet so many people that are willing to take time out of their busy day to listen to you, to talk to you, to share their hopes and dreams for this campus. It remains a balm for the soul, the thing that, despite everything during this time, keeps you going.
As the campaign comes to a close, you begin finishing up the last of your classroom talks, canvassing efforts, and chase those last few votes, hoping to close the gap.
However, by the end of it, Abbi had to tell me that it needed to come to an end. There was nothing more we could do.
So I went to class for the first time in nearly two weeks, barely able to think, and left that cramped room in Science A with my ears ringing and sat down. I wrote two statements: one in the case I lost, and one in the case I won.
We got to Mac Hall’s South Courtyard early. As students start to file in, you lose feeling in your arms and your legs become jelly.
I remember asking the outgoing SU President and VP External, “is this always what it feels like?”
Just before the count started, we facetimed my mother and my best friend Henry, who was in the United Kingdom, but had stayed up to see the results.
And then it was finally over.
The best thing for you to do when your race has been called is to let out a sigh of relief, regardless of if you win or not.
After congratulating Naomie, I stepped outside and finally allowed myself to cry, not because I lost, but because those gruelling nights and days were finally over. I hugged my sister and told her how proud I was of her.
The feeling was euphoric, as if a weight was off my shoulders. It was finally done.
However, I made the terrible mistake of posting the victory statement. Immediately, I began receiving congratulatory messages. Having to take it down and publish the statement I wrote in case I lost still makes me cringe to this day.
Elections have winners and losers, there’s no getting around that. Still, I am grateful for being able to say that I did it.
To any potential candidate reading this, I hope you learned something. You’re going to have a lot of people offering their two cents about your campaign.
I gave you mine, but the best advice I can offer is this: Don’t overthink it, and good luck.