The Student Government Association Senate is heading into elections with its lowest incumbent return rate in three years, as senators either graduate or decide to step away from the body, leaving a ballot dominated by first-time candidates for the second straight year.
Only three of 16 eligible incumbents are seeking senate re-election this year — with others leaving the body altogether or running for higher office — leaving a ballot of 20 verified senate candidates across all schools, down from 26 last year and 25 in 2024, competing for 39 seats. Twenty-eight of those seats are set to remain vacant if no write-in campaigns win, and nearly three-quarters of candidates on the ballot will be first-timers, more than half of whom are currently first-year students.
The SGA Senate can fill vacant seats throughout the year by voting to appoint students who apply.
Incumbent senators not seeking re-election cited diverging reasons for why they will not be returning to the body, including plans to study abroad and frustration with difficulty accomplishing their initiatives this year and a lack of internal support within the SGA. Eight incumbents ran to retain their seats in last year’s elections, and in 2024 nine candidates ran for re-election.
In 2023, the SGA Senate saw its smallest campaign pool in 21 years, where only 14 students and one incumbent ran. This year, 23 of 42 senators are ineligible to run for re-election due to graduating from their programs, with two others, SGA Sen. Aicha Sy (CCAS-U) and SGA Sen. Cheydon Naleimaile-Evangelista (CCAS-U), staging runs for vice president.
Joint Elections Commissioner Eric Gitson, whose commission is tasked with administering the SGA’s elections and recruiting candidates, said he noticed a lack of incumbents running this year but does not have a “concrete reason” for the trend. He said there is a “notable number” of seniors graduating from the body, and many others have said they are studying abroad.
He said incumbents retiring has opened up new opportunities for first-time candidates to run for positions in the body, keeping with a trend over the past two years where greater numbers of first-time candidates competed for seats.
“It’s encouraging that we’re seeing so many new people finding their way into the SGA,” Gitson said in a message.
Eleven candidates are competing in the undergraduate Columbian College of Arts & Sciences senate race — the largest and most competitive of the elections — marking one more candidate than last year and down from 13 in 2024. The slight growth in the number of candidates competing for a CCAS seat comes as the school is set to lose a senate seat, decreasing from eight to seven due to a slight drop in the school’s undergraduate enrollment.
Gitson said CCAS was “slightly over” the threshold for eight seats the past two years but lost about 200 students this academic year, which pushed it below the threshold. The SGA allocates senate seats based on the student population of each undergraduate and graduate division, granting one seat for every 750 students.
SGA Sen. Beatriz Salim (CCAS-U), a sophomore and one of the three senators running for re-election, said the SGA environment is “not the friendliest,” and the workload of reaching out to constituents, student organizations and administrators to accomplish initiatives can be “exhausting.” She said she weighed whether to leave the body but ultimately decided to run to keep her seat because she has “unfinished business,” like working with dining officials to launch a recycling awareness initiative.
She said as a first-time senator this year, she felt there was little institutional support explaining how senators can make connections with administrators to accomplish initiatives and poor communication from SGA leaders about scheduled training opportunities and meetings.
“I want to better the environment so people can feel comfortable reaching out to people to ask for help,” Salim said. “That’s my biggest reason for running, just bettering the SGA as a whole, from internal to outside.”
Cole Bowie, a sophomore who serves as the SGA’s deputy director for facilities, is a first-time candidate for a Columbian College of Arts & Sciences seat, who said he thinks the SGA has a “semi-bad” reputation, since students do not see the body as a place that can affect real change and instead is made up of students trying to build resumes or “role play politicians.” Bowie, who served as president of Potomac House in the Residence Hall Association, said he was inspired to run for the body this year because he wants to build on his leadership experience to advocate for students on the SGA’s larger platform.
“I’m really running because I want to take that kind of experience and that platform to a more broad SGA level to affect change in the entire University,” Bowie said.
Anya Srivastava, a first-year student vying for a CCAS senate seat, who also serves on the SGA Senate’s staff as a communications web designer, said she thinks the number of candidates competing in the CCAS senate race has not declined as much as other races because students in the University’s largest school are “dissatisfied” with GW and the quality of their education. She cited issues. like this year’s draining of the University-Wide Programs Fund and the recent tuition hike, for reasons she decided to throw her hat in the ring.
“I want to make sure that I have the best chance at life, and everything that I put into this school is given back to me,” Srivastava said. “And right now, that’s not happening.”
Elijah Edwards contributed reporting.
