For most people in Pennsylvania, the presidential primary is in three months. But for many others, election season is in full swing.

Just ask Jeremy Beitler about his car.

Beitler (senior-biology, philosophy and psychology) volunteered to spend his entire winter break in Iowa working for former Vermont governor Howard Dean in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

It wasn't a difficult choice to make.

"Something about Dean and the campaign he was running struck a chord in me that I didn't even think twice about going out there," Beitler said.

The week after finals week in December, Beitler packed up his 1995 Saturn SL2 and headed for Iowa.

About 100 miles west of Chicago, Beitler totaled his car. Nothing could deter him, though. He left the car in a junkyard and took a bus the rest of the way, arriving the next day.

It's not just Beitler and his car that have sacrificed for a particular candidate. Other students have entered the fray of Democrats fighting for the party's nomination, whether by stumping for a candidate locally or traveling to work at last week's Iowa caucuses or today's New Hampshire primary.

Today's primary is expected to be very close with recent polls showing Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry taking over the lead from initial frontrunner Dean.

In Iowa last week, Kerry took home the most delegates, narrowly defeating North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, while Dean finished a distant third. Missouri Congressman and former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt finished fourth in Iowa, then dropped out of the race. Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich and political activist the Rev. Al Sharpton finished with menial amounts of delegates, while former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun dropped out of the race in the week before the caucuses.

Connecticut Senator and former vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark did not take part in the caucuses, instead focusing their attention on New Hampshire.

The Republican side of the race is getting little media attention, as President George W. Bush is up for re-election. He will face the winner of the heated Democratic race in November.

Brandt Thorington (junior-political science) is in his native New Hampshire right now, working to get Edwards the nomination.

Thorington feels that geographically, New Hampshire is a more significant race than Iowa was.

"I think New Hampshire's more important right now, because Dean and Kerry are from neighboring states, so it's a must-win for both of them," he said.

For Jessica Sheffield (graduate-communications arts and sciences), getting involved was not only for political interests but scholarly ones as well.

Sheffield is planning on writing her master's thesis about the Dean campaign's Internet strategy, which has registered 600,000 supporters.

"I was drawn to the Dean campaign because of the way they used the Internet," Sheffield said. "I thought it was very refreshing to see someone try to reach out with the technology. The campaign is using the new technology in order to organize, motivate people and raise money."

Getting started

Thorington got an early start on the Edwards campaign, working for the candidate in New Hampshire all summer and then again over winter break.

"He was flying pretty low under the radar," Thorington said of the campaign during the summer. "He was just starting to form his message."

Initially, it was Edwards' chances in the general election that drew Thorington to him.

"I think that he's actually the candidate that can beat George W. Bush in the general election," he said. "He's from the South, which definitely helps, and he has a very centrist message."

This caused Thorington to compare Edwards to another Southern Democrat.

"He's very Clintonesque and very charismatic," he said. "He'll be able to bring a lot of people into the party."

For Beitler, it was a profession outside of politics that sparked his interest in Dean.

"The reason I first looked at him was that he is a doctor, and I have an interest in public health," said Beitler, who has plans to attend medical school in the fall.

Dean's stances on the war in Iraq, education and gay rights also appealed to Beitler. As governor of Vermont, Dean signed civil unions for gay couples into law.

"While I am a heterosexual, to me that showed me the ability to take what could be an unpopular decision and do it because it was right," Beitler said.

In the fall, Beitler decided to work for the campaign instead of going home for break. As part of the online Dean campaign, he signed up to volunteer, then headed to Iowa.

Sheffield first became interested in the Dean campaign when she wrote a paper on its use of the Internet for a class last fall. But for her thesis, simply studying the campaign at a distance was not going to work.

"I like the campaign, and I like the governor, and I thought it would be worth getting to know the campaign on the ground level instead of just studying it on the Internet," she said. "I'd never been involved in politics before. I didn't know what a campaign looked like."

Sheffield signed up online for Iowa Perfect Storm, an effort to draw out-of-state volunteers to Iowa for a weekend to work for the campaign. Iowa Perfect Storm was run each of the four weekends before the caucuses, but Sheffield decided she did not want to volunteer for only three days. Instead, she contacted the office in Davenport, Iowa, and arranged to volunteer for an entire week.

Sheffield drove from State College to her home in Mobile, Ala., on Dec. 15 and made the trip from Alabama to Davenport on New Year's Day.

"I found the campaign interesting to study, which is why I got involved in the first place, but I also think he's a good candidate," she said. "You tend to study things you like, and I don't think I could muster up much enthusiasm to study George W. Bush's campaign."

Campaigning

In New Hampshire, Thorington found himself joining the Edwards campaign "just as it was starting to launch into full swing."

Thorington made phone calls encouraging people to come to events and townhall meetings for Edwards. He also went door-to-door canvassing, handing out copies of Real Solutions for America, a 60-page book that explains Edwards' platforms.

"Pretty much everyone takes them," Thorington said. "There are a lot of people still making up their minds."

A highlight of Thorington's experience was getting to help set up for Edwards' first townhall meeting, which was televised on C-SPAN.

Over his time working with the campaign, Thorington has met the candidate several times, which only strengthened his support for him.

"He's a very nice guy," Thorington said. "He's very kind, intelligent and well-spoken."

Beitler's trip to Iowa was so lengthy that he became a coordinator for three of the four Iowa Perfect Storm weekends.

The Iowa Perfect Storm attracted 5,000 volunteers, roughly half of Dean's total volunteers in the state.

"Organizing people would not have been possible in those numbers if not for the Internet," Sheffield said. "Until they physically got there and got their packet, all of that was coordinated on the Internet."

Beitler made two trips to Iowa. His first trip lasted from Dec. 21 to Jan. 8. He then returned from Jan. 16 to 21 to work the last weekend before the caucuses.

As a coordinator, Beitler led groups of 250 to 300 people, training the volunteers on the campaign's goals and objectives.

In his time in Iowa, Beitler met people from all over the country, even some from his hometown of Reading.

"It gave me a real sense of pride of where I'm from, a real sense of community," he said.

On Christmas, a local pork farmer who supported Dean invited Beitler and about 25 others, who had nowhere else to go, into his home.

"It was cool," Beitler said. "It was like a feast."

The night before Beitler was going to return to Penn State from his first stint in Iowa, he rode to an airport in Muscatine, a small town outside of Davenport, to pick up Dean. Because he was riding in the van and not a driver, Beitler actually got to sit and talk to the candidate for about 20 minutes.

"We talked about everything except for politics," Beitler said.

After Beitler came back to Penn State to uphold his duties as a resident assistant, he caught a bus back to Iowa with Philly4Dean, a group that took about 150 people from Pennsylvania out for the last weekend before the caucus.

Beitler's post for the night of the caucuses was at a school in Cedar Rapids. In the end, Dean finished third at that caucus, getting support from 30 of 126 people.

That night, Beitler was not present when Dean spoke to 3,500 supporters during what some in the media have dubbed the "I Have a Scream" speech, in which the candidate shouted the names of 13 states he would be visiting in his attempt to win the Democratic nomination.

"It might not have been the best thing to do from a strategic perspective, but at the same time I admire him because he actually got emotional," Beitler said. "He was speaking to the volunteers. He definitely wasn't playing for the cameras."

Sheffield's week in Iowa found her doing a variety of tasks for the Dean campaign, including making phone calls, writing letters, sending out campaign literature and even cooking for volunteers. Her primary duty, though, was data entry.

"There's so much information to manage in a presidential campaign," she said.

Sheffield also got to meet people from across the country, including students from Stanford and James Madison universities and Penn State. She also got to very briefly meet Dean and shake his hand.

"The enthusiasm of the people working on the campaign was absolutely infectious," she said.

Although she was not in Iowa at the time of the caucuses, Sheffield did watch it on television and was surprised by Dean's third place finish. But even in her disappointment, she says she made the right decision to make the trip to Iowa and put 3,000 miles on her car in less than a month.

"Even if we had only won five percent of the vote and were dropping out today ... just the experience of meeting people, it's hard to describe," she said. "I'd do it again."

Alicia Turner graduated from Penn State last spring with degrees in public relations and political science and has since moved into political work.

Turner, a former president of the College Democrats at Penn State, worked as a field organizer in Iowa for Gephardt, "trying to get people to the caucuses." Since her candidate dropped out of the race, Turner has gone to New Hampshire to work for Clark.

Turner was surprised with Gephardt's poor showing in Iowa.

"I feel like it should have gone better based on our work and what the polls were," she said. "But the polls shifted a week before the caucus, so it was a shock that the polls were heading in that direction."

According to Sheffield, the Dean campaign viewed Gephardt as "the man to beat," while she worked in Iowa. Additionally, Beitler felt that Gephardt's television ads were all aimed directly at Dean.

"That's how the end result occurred," Turner said. "We weren't paying attention to the other two (Kerry and Edwards)."

The campaign at PSU

Brian Battaglia, president of Penn State's College Republicans, does not see a threat toward President Bush among the Democratic candidates.

"I think regardless of who is the Democratic candidate that Bush will win," Battaglia said. "I'm not concerned by any of them."

The College Republicans are currently in the "planning process" of how they will campaign for Bush, Battaglia said. The group is looking at a number of options, such as canvassing and voter registration drives, to support the president during the primary.

"Regardless of who [the Democratic candidate] is we're still going to do a lot on campus," Battaglia said. "We need to do a lot on campus to educate the Penn State students about the Republican Party and the president."

Jessica Hopkins (junior-international politics and Japanese) sees the allegiances of Penn State's College Democrats split between "the top-tier candidates."

"We're all united in the fact that we'll pretty much vote for a lawn mower over Bush," she said.

Hopkins, president of College Democrats, is also the director of Generation Dean at Penn State, the national youth branch of the Dean campaign.

Officially, though, the College Democrats as a group are "not allowed by charter to endorse any candidate before the convention in July," Hopkins said.

Instead, the group is attempting to keep a high profile by running voter registration drives and sponsoring a roundtable discussion about the different candidates. They are also working on a Rock the Vote event that would take place the weekend before the registration deadline of March 29.

Jeremy Adlon (junior-political science) is working at Penn State to support his candidate, John Kerry.

The president of Students for Kerry at Penn State, Adlon has only held this position for about a month.

"Our organization's really young," Adlon said. "We're just warming up."

Adlon sees Kerry as the best Democrat running.

"He's different from all the other candidates," he said. "He has a good idea of where the country's going and where it needs to go."

Adlon is starting a "Leaders Start Young" campaign, which is an organization for those interested in Kerry. Even more important to Adlon than his candidate is getting students interested in politics in general.

"That's why politicians don't pay attention to our age group, because we don't vote," he said.

The future

With the campaign gaining intensity every day, those involved could find reason to start to dislike the other candidates in the primary.

Except that doesn't seem to be the case.

"So much of the Democratic campaign right now is being run on getting Bush out of office, and I fully support that," Sheffield said.

Thorington offered similar sentiments.

"I'll support the candidate who gets the nomination," he said. "I think they're all good guys, and they're all better than Bush."

Adlon agreed as well.

"If John Kerry doesn't get the nomination, I think any Democrat would be better than Bush," he said.

Meanwhile, everyone involved keeps doing what they can for their candidate.

And Jeremy Beitler is wearing a Howard Dean shirt every day this semester to support his guy.

"I get about five comments a day, and they go beyond party lines," he said.