Exit Poll: Lessons Learned from Oakland's Precocious Political Scientist

At only 18, Ryan Schwertfeger has had his finger on the pulse of Oakland for the past three years.

The recent Indian Hills grad is packing up his one-man public opinion polling operation, but not before he’s learned some lessons about the local politics and population of his hometown.

Volunteering in a phone bank for Chris Christie’s 2009 gubernatorial effort sparked Schwertfeger’s interest in politics, he said. Working on a major campaign that relied heavily on understanding the issues in the electorate and communicating with voters showed the young volunteer a comparative disconnect when it came to local elections.

“It just struck a chord with me,” he remembered of that the first experience in politics. “Because you’re talking to real people, you’re seeing what they have to say, and politicians can take some feedback from the people.”

Beginning in 2010, the high school student stood outside the Oakland post office in his free time, polling passing residents on issues ranging from local and national elections to downtown improvements and municipal recreation areas.

“The town council is always saying, ‘Let us know what you think,’ so I thought maybe I could help them figure out what people were thinking and start asking those questions,” he said.

A regular audience member at the borough council’s public meetings, Schwertfeger has become acquainted with not only the issues pressing in the borough but also with the officials tasked with addressing them. And in the process, he’s gotten involved himself, working towards a dog park at the planned Great Oak Park.

Eventually, he matched the polls of the populace with one-on-ones with council candidates, interviewing most of the contenders for seats on the local governing body in the hope of strengthening communication about local political issues.

“I really hoped that through the polls and the interviews that the people and the politicians would get to hear each other and know each other more understandably,” Schwertfeger said.

While Gallup and other national pollsters closely study the election cycles, he said, that discourse was largely absent on the local scene, where views are often expressed by a handful of meeting attendees and elections are analyzed only after the final ballot count.

The days running a one-man operation outside the post office, Schwertfeger said, required persistence, and he is gracious for the support from those that took the polls and the officials that spoke with him about issues around town.

And what has he learned about where borough residents stand?

“I think a lot of people in Oakland want to see progress. They want to see the town improving in a positive way for the least impact to their wallets,” Schwertfeger said, adding that he believed the Great Oak Park plan was one area that represented that common cause.

Schwertfeger will head to Pennsylvania’s Waynesburg University in the fall, where he will study communications with a minor in political science as a member of the prestigious Stover Scholars program, which focuses on constitutional study.

Though he plans to follow Oakland politics from his college campus, especially the unfolding of Great Oak Park, Schwertfeger remains uncertain about a future in politics, though he does know that the three-year project exceeded the goals he had when he started.

“I think for what I envisioned,” he said, “just doing it out of curiosity but ending up with results, it succeeded greatly.”