Nathan Levit '20 presents his certificate project, "Portrait of a Bygone Era: Josh Svaty's Kansas Gubernatorial Run," during the Program in Journalism's Senior Colloquium.
For a Fall 2018 seminar on the art of profile-writing, I followed around a long-shot gubernatorial candidate, Josh Svaty. I witnessed him speaking at town halls, hosting fundraisers, participating in dreaded call time, sitting in mini-chairs at parent-teacher conferences, and herding his cattle from the summer to the winter pastures. I tried to contextualize Svaty within Kansas’s changing political infrastructure and within America’s changing political environment. When I turned this in originally, Svaty was still running for governor. I have updated and changed it after the election to attempt to reflect on what his loss means.