Bennet pleads case at CU Boulder: ‘If you vote, we win’

BOULDER — Swinging through University Memorial Center on the CU-Boulder campus minutes ago, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet pleaded soft and loud for students here to vote today. After speaking with several tables of students in the first room he entered, he moved between milling, snacking, studying young people in the second room and made straight for a table in the middle and climbed on top of it.

“I’m Sen. Michael Bennet. It’s Election Day. If you haven’t voted yet, I am begging you, take a moment please and vote,” he said. “The choice for Senate today is clear. It’s a choice between someone who has been a proponent of expanded educational opportunity for years and someone who says the Founding Fathers didn’t believe in student loans.

“I am begging you. If you vote, we will win. If you don’t, we will lose. It’s really that close.”

Bennet told a student news crew that the election was critical for young people. He told them he had been superintendent of the Denver Public School system but added that the election was about much more than just support for education. He said it was about bringing jobs back to the United States by changing policies that have rewarded corporations for moving jobs overseas.

“We haven’t created new jobs for years in our country,” he said.

At one table of studying students, Bennet met with a skeptic. “How can I get you to vote?” Bennet asked Anna Zelinskaya.

“Well, tell me some of your positions,” she said, sitting calmly at the other end of the round table.

Bennet said he was for more student loans. He said he was a businessman and his opponent, Weld County DA Ken Buck, was a lawyer. Bennet said this was the first time he had ever run for office.

Zelinskaya seemed to warm up.

“Wait, your name is Michael Bennet?” said one of the other students at the table. “You’re not the Michael Bennet who wrote ‘A Chorus Line,’ are you?”

The student was looking at papers from a Development of American Musical Theater course. She held up a paper and pointed to the name ‘Michael Bennet.’

“Well, what about that?” Bennet joked with Zelinskaya. “What if I wrote ‘A Chorus Line’? That’s worth a vote, right?”

Zelinskaya later told the Colorado Independent she had class until 6 p.m. She said she was “kind of a Democrat” but couldn’t say with confidence because she didn’t know the issues.

“The polls are open till 7 o’clock, right? I think I will vote, now,” she said.

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