Instructor Spotlight: Alex Wahl

What inspired you to teach this course?

Growing up in New Hampshire, politics is always in your face. From local diners to our hometown news station, candidates and election chatter are everywhere you look. The Granite State is often (jokingly) lauded as a seemingly lab-grown state, the perfect place for retail politics. That, indeed, it is.

During the 2018 midterm elections, I was a rising freshman in high school. I decided that rather than watching this fascinating process play out on TV or social media, I wanted to try my hand at organizing. Through a local campaign and party committee, I volunteered for the first time. Throughout that year, I learned the most fundamental yet impactful lessons about organizing. From there, I stayed engaged by running local campaigns, leading grassroots fundraising projects, and operating student-run political organizations.

For me, getting involved was easy. All it took was picking up the phone and calling my well-staffed local precinct committee. In many other states and countries, these experiences are not nearly as accessible. The way I learned about the ins and outs of organizing was through watching and doing it myself. This course was born through the idea of offering a bootcamp to increase first-year students' understanding of how power and organizing are used in our system.

How do you define political organizing?

Political organizing is a wide-ranging idea. Our class has defined it as the manipulation of capital to achieve an objective, which often manifests itself as a campaign, initiative, or piece of legislation.

How has political organizing evolved over time and what role does social media play in current political movements?

While political organizing shape-shifts to the technological and societal context it's exercised in, its fundamentals tend to remain constant. Those organizing always need the buy-in of others, regardless of how that is achieved.

With social media, much of the messaging and outreach is done through wider networks, rather than peer-to-peer conversations. The result here works in both directions: contact is less personal and tailored, but it also introduces the compounding effect of resonating with the reactions of others.

Organizing is not uniformly impacted by social media. For example, New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was uniquely successful in using X, formerly known as Twitter, to elevate his ideas and consolidate support. On the other hand, a candidate for small town Select Board may find Facebook a useful forum to talk about local issues, but likely will gain very little interaction or notoriety from a platform like X, regardless of how advanced their messaging may be.

For some, social media makes a world of difference, but this is highly dependent on location, scale, and stature.

What piece of advice would you have for students who are looking to get involved in political organizations?

They should begin at the grassroots level. Find an election, ballot initiative, or legislative effort that you truly believe in. Knocking on doors and phone banking rarely receive the praise they deserve. There is no more effective work, or better training, than reaching out to your neighbors and speaking to them about something important to you. The more local you go, the bigger the impact you will have.

What do you hope that students will take away from your course?

I hope students walk away from this course knowing that organizing is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Depending on the size, scope, and aim of the initiative at hand, varying tactics and theories of organizing will apply. In a School Board campaign, it is unlikely to see television ads; in an open congressional race, it is difficult to break through without running them.

Success in this course means seeing the given election, ballot initiative, or legislative effort as a puzzle. Solving each unique puzzle requires the effective implementation of a certain subset of skills. Based on the population you are appealing to, the demographics of the area, and the context of the effort, it is rare to have uniform overlap.

Alex Wahl is a senior at Tufts University, majoring in International Relations and Political Science. In 2024, he served as a DNC delegate representing New Hampshire's First Congressional District. Throughout his time at Tufts, he has been involved in Tufts Democrats, Tufts Hemispheres, Tufts United for Immigrant Justice, and a number of other politically centered organizations.