ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The 2020 campaign finally gets real Monday with the Iowa caucus taking place.

That’s followed by the New Hampshire primary on February 11. A group of 29 students from the University of South Florida’s St. Petersburg campus will be joining the mob of reporters and campaign staffers. The students are all part of political science professor Judithanne McLauchlan’s “Road to the White House” class.

This is the fifth time that Professor McLauchlan will take students to New Hampshire in advance of the primary.  The students will volunteer to work with candidates like Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Andrew Yang, Elizabeth Warren, and President Trump.

The demand to get into the class was the strongest since it began in 2004. 

A former staffer in the Clinton White House who later worked on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, McLauchlan has been teaching at USFSP since 2003. That was the same year she included her “Road to the White House” class, and so this will be the fifth time she’s sending a group of students to volunteer for the presidential candidates.

Donald Trump’s election has certainly captivated interest among people who previously never cared much about electoral politics.  McLauchlan says in fact she had the most demand ever for students to get into this semester’s class.

“Even as we saw in 2018 carrying over in 2020, a lot of young people being interested in this election in particular, wanting to get involved, even if they’re not political science majors wanting to know what’s going on and feeling like they can contribute to the process,” she said.

McLauchlan usually limits enrollment to about 20 students so that they can comfortably fit into two-fifteen seat vans. But this time around, there will be 29 students working on eight separate campaigns. She said there was never so much competition to get into the class.

“So there was a several month long application process,” she says. “There was a written application, then we did in-person and Skype interviews. And then the selection.”

Among those attending include 22-year-old Jazzy Duarte, an environmental science major who says her involvement in Charlie Crist’s 2014 gubernatorial race informed her about how important public policy was to the environment.

She’ll be working on Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar’s campaign.

“I just wanted to get a nice feel of what a smaller campaign would look like, because right now we have a bunch of front-runners like Sanders and Warren and they have these huge campaigns and I was like, ‘well, I want to see what it felt like to work on a smaller campaign,” she said, adding that with many of Klobuchar’s “resonate with her.”

Not all of the students on the trip are working with Democrats.

Nicholas Pasierb will be working with the New Hampshire Republican Party on behalf of his candidate of choice, President Donald Trump.

Pasierb’s first experience as a presidential voter was in 2016, where he said he seriously studied the platforms of Trump and Hillary Clinton.  He said it was a tough choice then, but not so much now, as he’s now solidly backing the president.

“I think I saw a lot of his policies that he said he was going to do, he’s fought for,” Pasierb says, blaming a Democratic congress for stifling more of Trump’s agenda.

Although this will be McLauchlan’s fifth trip taking students to New Hampshire, she says there are always logistic challenges. She originally went to the Granite State in September to coordinate with the campaigns about working with volunteers.

At least she’s had time to interact with her students. In 2008, the New Hampshire Primary took place shortly after New Years Day, before the winter semester began at USFSP.

The students left from Tampa on Sunday heading to Boston, and will stay until the day after the primary takes place on February 11.