UCSC student’s website gets national attention
A new Bernie Sanders support website, founded by a University of California, Santa Cruz student, is making national headlines. ImagineBernie.com was recently featured on businessinsider.com.
Kevin Viet Le, 19, founded the website about month ago, but it is already known around the world.
“It is a global effort,” said Le. “We have people in Malta, people in Britain, Germany, Sweden, Finland, a guy from Brazil.”
But why do people from other countries who can’t vote in a U.S. election care so much about Bernie Sanders?
“If he gets elected president, he is going to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world,” said Le. “He is going to affect every country in the world with his policies.”
Le is a computer science major turned activist on a campus that is ripe with students pushing for political change, but most lean towards the left.
“This campus has a reputation,” said U.C. Santa Cruz politics professor Daniel Wirls. “It kind of lives on to a certain extent as being sort of a left campus.”
But just because the campus has a reputation doesn’t make it true, according to Wirls.
“I think it is a mix here as it is almost anywhere,” said Wirls. “I happen to teach in the politics department so my guess is there are more liberals and activists students in politics than there are in some other majors like engineering,” added Wirls.
However according to an article published by the schools newspaper, there hasn’t been an official college republican club on campus since 2009. There is a Facebook group, but they haven’t posted anything since 2014.
“There is a sense that there aren’t a lot of them so it could just be small numbers and potentially feeling like a minority,” said politics graduate student Trina Barton.
There are certainly conservative students on campus, according to Barton, but they are just out numbered. As for why that is, Barton said it could have something to do with where students are coming from.
“The folks that are coming from Nor Cal we are in the bay area bubble, there just aren’t as many conservatives generally,” Barton said.
