The C-Span bus came to University of Wisconsin Monday morning to educate students on the 2020 presidential election during the buses’ seven-week tour through “battleground” states that will be important in the election.
The bus which has been touring the country since 1993 and will visit 10 states total, parking at middle schools, high schools and universities.
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The bus used interactive screens to educate students and community members on the upcoming election. These screens had information on candidates, primaries and major stops during the campaign as well as unedited videos of press conferences and other political events with searchable transcripts.
Shannon Augustus, a C-Span marketing representative and one of the five people that travel all across the country with the bus, said that they focus on schools to provide free educational resources that can be used in the classroom.
Augustus said that the unedited nature of these resources is important because it means students can use them as primary sources.
“Our main mission is for folks to make up their own mind, so no one at C-span is going to tell you this is the right way to think about something,” Augustus said. “We kind of give you an unfiltered view, so you can really see it how it’s happening”
Those who toured the bus also had access to C-Span’s video library with 252,000 hours of content. The library allowed students to search for politicians and see unedited footage of all the events they were involved in accompanied by transcripts.
C-Span was also conducting interviews outside the bus as a part of their “Voices from the Road” series that asks people what they think an important issue Washington should address is. Augustus said that when C-Span asked this question during their 50 Capitals Tour she noticed a lot of similarities.
“A lot of times we had kind of key issues in each state but a lot of them were very similar, education, infrastructure,” Augustus said. “We had some common themes among those states so it should be interesting to see what people have to say.”
The bus was also in Madison to promote C-Span’s internships. Agustus, who started out as an intern herself, said that students with an interest in politics should apply because C-Span “would love to see some Wisconsinites.”
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Before coming to UW the bus went through La Crosse and next week it will head to Milwaukee where C-Span will be conducting live interviews in their mobile studio, complete with a small control room in the back. Augustus said that these interviews may shed some light on what will be important to voters in the 2020 election.
““we’re gonna hear from different people, different perspectives…we might have a good idea of what people think,” Augustus said.
