Kyle Coleman quickly turned away from his phone. He looked at the three friends waiting out the results with him and acknowledged his defeat.

“We lost.”

Coleman came in third, receiving about 22.9 percent, or 896 votes. Current Vice President Allie Curtis won with approximately 31.1 percent — 1,221 votes. PJ Alampi received 23.9 percent, finishing 284 votes behind Curtis, and Iggy Nava garnered 773 votes — or 19.7 percent.

The junior finance, information management and technology, accounting and economics major sat solemnly, staring at the ground in his friend’s apartment on the 700 block of Ostrom Avenue. A re-run of “Friends” played on mute on a TV in the front of the room, and the only sound that could be heard was a ticking as Coleman tapped the screen of his iPhone.

He had been 326 votes short from the presidency.

Nick Dauch, a senior entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises, marketing and management major; Craig Dennin a senior advertising and marketing major; and Nick Bonafila, a junior chemical engineering major sat silently next to him.

“I hate to be a sore loser right now, but you’re obviously the better candidate,” Dauch said to Coleman, a few minutes after the results came in.

During the campaign, Coleman promised he would address safety, segregation between different student groups on campus as well as changing SA to be more rooted in tangible results, if elected.

The scene was vastly different from an hour prior, when the four sat laughing about everything from “Family Guy” to the entire campaign process. They joked Booth Hall was “a swing hall” and that Fox News was inaccurately projecting the winner of the race.

In fact, when voting ended at 11:59 p.m. Thursday, Coleman was watching a clip from TLC’s “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” on the computer, and though he was laughing, a sense of tenseness was starting to build.

“My palms are so sweaty right now,” he uttered at 12:27 a.m, just four minutes before receiving the results.

Current President Dylan Lustig was the next to call at 12:35 a.m, telling Coleman that despite the loss he “deserves to celebrate tonight.”

Though losing the race, he said he plans to remain involved with SA, but he doesn’t know in what way.

“The problems that I ran on — the problems that all four of us ran on — they’re still there tonight, they’re still there tomorrow, they’ll still be there in January,” he said. “Yeah, I’m gonna stay.”

 

Published on November 16, 2012 at 3:18 am

Contact Dylan: [email protected] | @dylan_segelbaum