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Martin O'Malley Brings Campaign for President to UVa

Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley paid a visit to the University of Virginia on Tuesday evening to try and drum up support for his presidential bid.  WMRA’s Jordy Yager has this report.

What do you do when you’re polling in third place in a race to be the Democratic nominee for president? Well for starters — you beat people to their punch line.

MARTIN O’MALLEY: I know that when a man stands before you with 7 percent national support, he tells you he’s running for president of the United States, and it’s going very well, that there’s a fine line between delusion and imagination.

Martin O’Malley packed a full house Tuesday evening at the University of Virginia’s Batten School, as more than 200 students braved a cold rain to hear the former governor talk about gun control, ISIS, and — a subject dear to his audience’s heart — reducing college debt.

O’Malley is currently trailing far behind his Democratic rivals, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). In his most favorable recent poll, he has 7 percent of the vote, compared to 26 percent for Sanders and Clinton’s looming 59 percent.

But that’s okay, says O’Malley.

O’MALLEY: Well you know what? I kind of like a tough fight. I’ve always been drawn to tough fights. I think the tough fights bring out the best in us. I think the tough fights might be the way the hidden God has of telling us we’re actually fighting for something worth saving.  

And while that may sound like something straight off the stump — and it is, he’s used it on other crowds before — the evening was less a rally, and more a conversation. After talking for about half-an-hour, O’Malley shed his suit jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and took questions from eight students in the audience.

Diane D’Costa, a second year undergraduate at UVA, from Howard County, Maryland touched on a hot topic. With the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference currently underway in Paris, she asked:

DIANE D’COSTA: My question is regarding climate change and you recognized that the younger generation believes in climate change, know it’s a real thing, but how do we communicate that to the older generations and those who disbelieve the data?

O’MALLEY: The, um — you guys have to do that. Look, I’m counting on you, in fact, to do that. I said, kind of, I think, in passing that I rarely meet young Americans under 30 that deny that climate change is real…as Democrats we believe in science.

O’Malley drew applause eight times from the crowd over the course of the hour. And if length and volume were any gauge, the issues most dear to the students were immigration reform and women’s rights.

O’MALLEY: I believe that there are some decisions that are best left to women and their doctors, there are some decisions that government’s no good at making.

But for all of their support around specific issues, the crowd of young voters appeared to be more undecided than firmly in O’Malley’s camp. Nobody carried a sign or donned a shirt with his name on it. There were no impromptu chants taken up either for him, or any other candidate. One student in the audience had a phone case with Bernie Sanders’s face plastered on it. If that counts?

I caught up with 22-year old Terry Mason afterwards. He’s a 2nd year Masters of Public Policy student at the Batten School and, as the president of the Batten Graduate Counsel, he introduced O’Malley to the crowd earlier that evening.

Mason said he was impressed, but that he, like many of his peers, is still searching for whom he’ll support.

TERRY MASON: I know that they’re definitely a lot of people in the Batten School who support Governor O’Malley, but we have a very broad spectrum. We have lots of conservatives, lots of Democrats, lots of independents and people in the middle. For a lot of individuals, especially on the Republican side, it’s a wide open field right now.

Jordy Yager was a freelance reporter for WMRA from 2015 - 2019.