This article is featured in the 2024 Freshman special issue.
Between the regular Town meetings, historical first-in-the-nation primary and the country’s second-largest legislature — trailing only the U.S. Congress — politics in New Hampshire can sometimes feel more like an unofficial state sport than a civic duty. If that is true across the Granite State, it is especially so in Hanover. On Dartmouth’s 4,500-student campus, members of the College’s tight-knit community hold a vast array of backgrounds, experiences and opinions. Student political groups, which create spaces for dialogue across the political spectrum, take advantage of that fact.
The Dartmouth Political Union, a “nonpartisan, student-led political organization,” is among the most “preeminent” debate-oriented groups on campus, according to its website.
DPU public relations director Roger Friedlander ’27 said the group aims to create space for “respectful political dialogue.” The club hosts unrecorded and public weekly meetings to “discuss any salient political issues or other important topics of the day” in a “small group setting,” he said.
“We really stress creating a safe and respectful place for students to share their genuine opinions,” Friedlander said.
He added that the group also facilitates discussions through panels and speeches throughout the term featuring “politically inclined public figures or activists from all across the political spectrum.”
The “most popular [DPU] event” that Friedlander said he attended was an April 10 debate on gun control, titled “Guns in America,” with Spike Cohen — a libertarian activist and political candidate — and David Hogg, a gun control activist who survived the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The Cohen-Hogg debate “drew a lot of attention on campus” and went “pretty viral” on social media, according to Friedlander.
“Through these events, we hope that we are starting the conversation and inspiring more discussion across campus about difficult issues that sometimes people would stray away from for various reasons,” he said. “It’s our goal to make those conversations a little bit easier.”
In a typical year, the DPU also hosts at least two student debates in Filene Auditorium, Friedlander said. The events are unrecorded and open to the public.
“These [debates] provide another opportunity for students who are really interested or engaged on one topic to show everybody else what they know, do their research and bring their ideas in front of a welcoming and interested audience,” Friedlander said.
Looking forward, the DPU also plans to integrate the election season into its regular activities. In addition to weekly meetings — which will serve as a “platform and space” for students to “share their thoughts”on the election — the DPU plans to host two debates related to election topics in the fall as part of an inaugural debate series, according to DPU president Malcolm Mahoney ’26.
The series, which is supported by the Office of the President, will host debates between “pundits and experts” and debates between students, according to Mahoney. The DPU has been considering a possible student debate structure for the series, where participants would explain why they plan to vote for either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, Mahoney said.
Similar to the DPU, the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy hosts dialogue-focused events throughout the term, often working with student political groups to organize them.
This summer, the Rockefeller Center hosted two forums for Republican and Democratic candidates running for New Hampshire’s second Congressional district. With the Rockefeller Center’s assistance, politically-minded students ran the events: members of Dartmouth Democrats moderated the Democratic forum on Aug. 12, while the Republican event was co-hosted by the Dartmouth Conservatives on Aug. 19.
Assistant director for public programs and special events Dvora Greenberg Koelling said the Rockefeller Center’s public programs are a “great opportunity for students to engage” with political leaders and the political process.
“Students we’ve been able to work with blow my mind,” Greenberg Koelling said.
The Dartmouth Democrats focus on political dialogue, too. The group’s executive director Quinn Allred ’26 said his group members have a “broad gambit of policy interests,” adding that their weekly meetings include “large amounts of time” for discussion.
“There’s always a space if someone has the inspiration to speak,” Allred said.
Allred said Dartmouth Democrats meetings include a guest speaker “almost every week,” with past speakers including Vermont state Rep. Esme Cole, D-Windsor, and New Hampshire state Sen. Sue Prentiss. The latter half of club meetings, though, is dedicated to discussing “what’s happening nationally” and “whatever is on people’s minds,” he added.
Allred said the group hosted back-to-back events with the Democratic candidates for New Hampshire’s second Congressional district in the spring. He said the two events — roundtable discussions with New Hampshire congressional candidate Colin Van Ostern Tu ’09 and New Hampshire congressional candidate Maggie Goodlander — were “intimate” and among his favorites since joining the organization. Club members were able to ask the candidates about their political journeys and “for an extended level of detail” on issues including the candidates’ views on the Israel-Hamas war, he explained.
Following those discussions, Allred went on to co-moderate the August Democratic forum with Dartmouth Democrats communications director Lucy Vitali ’26. Allred said he believes it is “really important” to provide spaces for “a large diversity of opinions.”
“There are so many things that incoming Dartmouth students have a great degree of knowledge about and specialty on, and it’s easy to get siloed like that,” Allred said.
In anticipation of the election this fall, Dartmouth Democrats will invite guest speakers — including elected officials and Democratic candidates — to speak at weekly meetings, according to co-president Prescott Herzog ’25. The club will also be encouraging the community to vote through phone banking, texting and canvassing.
Herzog said Dartmouth Democrats are partnering with Organize New Hampshire — a campaign paid for by the New Hampshire Democratic Party that organizes for in-state Democratic candidates — and are “in the works” on partnering with other on-campus organizations.
“One of my goals specifically has been trying to do affinity outreach, so talking to different diasporas and communities on campus about voter engagement and getting involved,” Herzog said. “We’re in the talks with a couple of different organizations on partnering on that.”
Across campus — and even across the ideological spectrum — students work to foster open and respectful conversations. Conservative Students of Dartmouth co-founder and president Alex Azar ’25 said his group “aims to be a place for students on campus who are right of center,” regardless of their party affiliation.
Azar started the group in the winter of 2023 with Paige Pattison ’24, who — along with Azar — felt campus lacked spaces to discuss conservative political ideas. The Dartmouth Republicans, a preexisting conservative campus student group, were “sort of defunct,” Azar explained, and had “alienated” some conservatives who did not align with the Republican Party of Donald Trump.
“There were a number of students who were dissatisfied with the level of discussion of conservative ideas,” he said. “The major impetus for starting this club was that we wanted a place where students could have substantive discussions of conservative ideas where we weren’t bogged down by political considerations.”
Azar said his group hosts weekly meetings, which are open to campus and dedicated to the “unfettered discussion of conservative ideas.”
“We encourage people who disagree with us to come to our meetings,” Azar said. “So far, that has been exactly the case. Every meeting we’ve had — on gun control, on voting laws — the best part of those discussions have been the back and forth of students who respectfully disagree with traditional conservative ideas.”
While the group has been mostly focused on “building a consistent student base” for their weekly meetings since its founding, Azar said the organization has also hosted several larger events, including the August Republican candidate forum.
Azar, Allred and Friedlander all agreed that encouraging dialogue between students who hold different points of view is essential. Dartmouth should discourage the idea that “just because someone disagrees with you means they’re a bad person or less worthy of your attention,” Friedlander said.
“We recognize that Americans have very diverse backgrounds and very different visions for America, and I think that those are what we’re trying to platform the most,” Friedlander said. “I think this is particularly important at Dartmouth because we are a small campus and have such a tight-knit community that being able to have these conversations is really important to us.”
In anticipation of the election, faculty and staff are also planning a variety of election-related programming similarly meant to foster discourse, questions and understanding.
This fall, government professors Russell Muirhead, Herschel Nachlis and William Wohlforth are offering GOVT 30.17/PBPL 024, “The 2024 Election.” The course will cover topics including polarization, democratic erosion and race and gender in American politics, Muirhead said.
“We thought that there should be something in the curriculum that tried to clarify what’s at stake in this election,” Muirhead said. “What’s at stake in domestic policy … and foreign policy and what it tells us about the condition of American politics.”
The Rockefeller Center — which in January co-hosted a Path to the Presidency series with presidential candidates ahead of the New Hampshire primary — will focus on “top-ticket issues” and “being a source of information” this fall, Greenberg Koelling said.
The Rockefeller Center will also host several speaker events that “align” with the government course, in addition to “a few outlier programs” unrelated to the course, including a speaker event titled “(Mis)Understanding the Politics of the Energy Transition,” Koelling said. The event, which will take place in October, covers the nonpartisan advancement of “the environmental protection agenda” with University of Texas School of Law professor David Spence, according to Koelling.
