Molly Root, Ron Ockert, Matt Daniels (Left to right: Beckie Strum; photo taken from WAER.org courtesy of Ron Ockert; photo taken from Facebook courtesy of Matt Daniels)
“My boss is running for the school board, the city school board. So I hope he wins. Over the past couple of years, we just launched the Say Yes to Education program, which I would have figured that would have accumulated better scores. In fact, we’ve seen the opposite.”
(Tom Brown of the East neighborhood in Syracuse, 26, financial planner, campaign aide for Stephen Swift, a Democratic candidate for Syracuse City School District Board of Education)
“Health care — because my sister who’s 24 doesn’t have health care right now, and that kind of worries me, I guess. She can’t have insurance until some time mid-September, and she’s been sick for a little while and it’s been weird.”
(Molly Root of Oswego, 19, student at Canisius College in Buffalo visiting sister at Syracuse University, registered Democrat)
“The stalemate in the economy — the economy’s gone stagnant and it’s scary. All the money they’ve dumped in and all the things they’ve tried and nothing’s working. That’s nobody’s fault in particular. I realize a lot of fingers are pointed on that, but it’s just not working. Everybody’s scared to invest, I think, and everybody’s scared to spend money, and big business is scared to spend money. So, it’s just stopped.”
(Ron Ockert of Syracuse, 62, director of operations at WAER radio, Democrat)
“The next voting decision would be based on economic stability of the country and who can come up with the best plan to move forward to bring back economic stability, because it goes hand in hand with social programs, unemployment. They all go hand in hand.”
(Matt Daniels of North Syracuse, 50, electronic technician, registered Republican, but considers himself an independent)
“I feel like by the time they all get to the level they’re at, there’s so much corruption that, I don’t know, they can’t do much with what they’re given when they get there. Like with Obama, he got into office and he can’t really do much because there’s so much fighting him.”
(Katelyn Voigt of Fayetteville, 28, at-home aide and nursing student, unaffiliated with a party)
(Beckie Strum is a senior with dual majors in newspaper journalism and Middle Eastern studies.)
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