College Republicans at ASU are looking to promote conservative ideology throughout Arizona with a new statewide blog.
The ASU organization is taking steps to involve College Republicans at other Arizona universities to contribute content to The Campus Revolutionary, which is set to launch in November.
College Republicans President Jessica Bolitho, a political science senior, said the blog’s purpose is to strengthen the conservative movement in Arizona through a pooling of ideas.
“Our goal is to educate people on what it means to be a conservative,” Bolitho said. “There are a lot of misconceptions about the conservative agenda and we want to shatter the stereotypes.”
The blog will be published through the Arizona Federation of College Republicans and will feature student articles from NAU and UA as well as local community colleges.
The group tried to start the blog last spring on its Web site, but stopped due to costs. This year’s dilemma has been finding writers, Bolitho said.
“I’ve been going around the state talking to other College Republicans about how they should get involved and how it will benefit them,” she said. “With midterms coming around, it’s been hard trying to find people to write.”
Bolitho said though she’s trying to launch the Web site this semester, she hopes it will really take off in the spring.
College Republicans treasurer and accounting sophomore Corbin Smith said the inspiration for what was originally set out to be a newspaper came the night President Barack Obama was elected.
Former vice president of ASU’s College Republicans Daniel Parsons spoke at a meeting the night Obama was elected last year.
“I’m sick of seeing ‘change we can believe in,’ we need to see revolution,” he said. His words inspired the group to start the blog.
Plans to start the newspaper fell through because of internal errors, Smith said. Organizing a newspaper takes a lot of coordination and the group wasn’t ready for it, so it instead decided a blog was the best bet, he said.
“We really weren’t as organized then as we are now,” Smith said.
Smith will be one of the blog’s writers and said because of better communication with other universities, the blog should be well read.
“In order to relieve the burden [on writers] we do need to expand statewide and get more writers in from different places for more perspectives,” Smith said.
President of Young Democrats at ASU and political science junior RJ Watson said he likes the idea of the College Republicans starting a blog to get out its ideas.
“I think it’s great they’re using social media to get out the frame beyond politics,” he said.
Watson, however, refused to comment on whether or not his club would use any social media in the future because he said it doesn’t have anything to do with the club’s platform as a Democratic group.
Bolitho said it would be great if Young Democrats started its own blog because people will gain knowledge through collaboration.
“I’m all for people sharing ideas and being educated,” she said.
Reach the reporter at dbjoraas@asu.edu.
