You can’t get much more Washington insider than being the editor-in-chief of Roll Call. Like the long line of impressive people before me, I relished both the title and its perks. (Handing out the coveted Roll Call trophy at the Congressional Baseball Game is top of mind.) And as readers of my Newsroom Confidential column in 2014 and 2015 know, I loved the idea of Roll Call as the neighborhood newspaper of Capitol Hill. That being on the inside made us all a part of something important, something special. A decade later, I’m 2,677 miles away, teaching journalism in my home state of California. It is perhaps crazy I still consider myself an insider, even though few understand my jokes about former Speaker John Boehner and I can no longer brag that I can name every senator by their face. My students get to hear about me playing in the Congressional Women’s Softball Game, and I can tell them I was in the room the day President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Roll Call has always felt like the place where I belonged, and I’m thrilled to return today with a little Western perspective. Things look different from out here. As California Democratic Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove can tell you, USC, where I teach, does not at first seem like a particularly politically active school. Joining the faculty after leading politics coverage at the Los Angeles Times the first two years of the Trump administration seemed like a welcome break. Of course, within minutes of me starting the job, students asked if they could create a politics desk in the Annenberg Media newsroom I oversee, and I was quickly recruited to teach political reporting. The break was short-lived, but this work is way more fun. This is no ordinary class. It has an experiential learning element, thanks to a generous alum who wants the students to see politics as they truly are, far from their — let’s face it, liberal — college campus bubble. I’ve taken students all over America to cover caucuses and primaries, redistricting and the battle for congressional majorities. And this semester, my students have immersed themselves in swing states like Michigan, Arizona and Nevada to truly understand the voters who are going to decide the next president, who controls Congress and the direction of our nation. We stay in an Airbnb together and I drive them around in a giant van. In this world, the students are the outsiders, dropped into a state most have never visited. Preparation for the trips is a big focus of the class: How do you decide where to go, who to call, what to take seriously and, just as important, where to eat? In Iowa, West Coast students who had never even seen snow learned the hard way that it’s not easy to push a 12-seater out of a snowbank. In South Carolina, they had an hour with the veteran Democratic leader Rep. James E. Clyburn, whom only one of them had been able to identify in the first week’s pop quiz. In each state, students met voters with vastly divergent political perspectives from their own. At a Donald Trump town hall in Michigan, they heard from people about their hopes and fears. And those didn’t sound so different from the worries and dreams of people they met at a Kamala Harris rally outside Phoenix. Between them, my 20 students have spoken to hundreds of voters, interviewed members of Congress and seen events with the candidates and their surrogates large and small. By getting out of California, we’ve all learned a lot from each other. And in some ways, seeing the world from their eyes has helped reinvigorate my passion for this stuff. Some of the things I learned over the course of my nearly 25 years in journalism still apply now: Stay hydrated, always use the restroom, look for somewhere you can charge your device, make friends with the heroes on the advance teams. A big one has been to act like you belong, and that it’s always better to ask for forgiveness than seek permission, especially when it comes to interviewing politicians. You can see the fruits of their labor from Arizona and Nevada right here in Roll Call. As we close out the final day of campaign coverage from Las Vegas, I’m reflecting on how they will all remember being so up close and personal in this unprecedented election year. Seeing some of my former peers and colleagues in the back of high school gyms and standing in security lines this year, I was reminded that it’s good to get a little outsider perspective. The students noticed some bored-looking reporters only partially paying attention, or that so many in the national press corps rarely travel farther than 30 minutes from the closest metro airport in a swing state. The students still have so much to learn, but they are listening more closely. Maybe because the idea of having a vote with so much influence remains novel. Maybe it’s because they aren’t jaded by years of hearing the same thing over and over again. An organizer at a Harris rally in Maricopa County, Ariz., got the crowd fired up before the vice president took the stage, telling them, “This is not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are even higher.” I rolled my eyes when I heard him, but when I debriefed with the students after the event I realized it’s actually true. For these first-time voters who have only known a divided country where everything is cranked up to 11, this really is a monumental moment. I’m honored to be back with the Capitol Hill community. You can reach me at Christina.Bellantoni@usc.edu.
