Day 3: Meg Kinnard and the SCDP (02/19/2024)

Throughout this internship we will occasionally be having various guest lectures and first up on that list: Meg Kinnard! She's a reporter for the Associated Press (AP) based in SC and has been covering politics and the elections for years. More specifically one of her topics has been Nikki Haley since before she even held the governorship, let alone her presidential campaign. Kinnard has been following Haley on the trail in SC and told us that right after the primaries she would be heading out to a Super Tuesday state! 

She filled us in on what it's like to report on politics, how she mamanges her relationships with various political figures, and how she does her absolute best to remain unbiased in her writing. On of my favorite notes she made on that last point  -- If you can tell who she is voting for or her opinion by the end of the piece, she's done something wrong. I went back to look at some of the reporting she's done and I can safely safe, in my opinion, Meg Kinnard does a great job of this! Not only did she give us some great insights into a side of the political world we don't get to see often, but she was also just a really cool person overall and more than happy to answer our burning questions. 

After our session with Kinnard we headed over to the SCDP to meet with their leadership and learn about SC's political atmosphere and discuss what we would be doing over the week. We first met with Christale Splain, the Chair of the SCDP, and Jay Parmley, the Executive Director of the SCDP. They both gave us some brief introductions on themselves and talked about their positions and the work they did before the Democratic primary that just occurred two weeks before we got to SC, and what thier roles are looking like now planning for November and the smaller in state elections to come. We also got to meet with Matt Greene, the SCDP Tech Director but his role is much more all encompassing than his title leads you to believe. He walked us through some voting history statistics and explained some campaign strategy used across the state to target various voting groups. Though not everyone is quite as enthused by statstics I was enamoured by the presentation and was blown away by the vast amount of information the parties work with, but also the large gaps they face in figuring out targeted strategy to get people to the polls on behalf of Democrats. Later that day we spent some time doing more phone banking for the SCDP and headed back to the hotel around 5:30 for an early night before our next day!