College senior Isabella Corman moderated a speaking panel at the 2024 Republican National Convention as a part of an Annenberg program. (Photo courtesy of Isabella Corman)
Rising College senior Isabella Corman moderated a panel at the 2024 Republican National Convention in July as a student leader of a delegation sent by a course at the Annenberg School for Communication.
The course, called “Conventions, Debates, and Campaigns,” is offered every four years at Penn in tandem with the United States presidential election cycle. Each year that it is offered, Annenberg sends a group of students and staff to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
Annenberg has been hosting panels at both conventions for students and the public since the 2000s. The initiative, led by professors David Eisenhower, Marjorie Margolies, and Craig Snyder, has operated in conjunction with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism for the past 16 years.
Guided by Eisenhower’s input, Corman took the initiative to organize and host a panel at the RNC. She led preparations including managing travel arrangements, guest invitations, and panel questions.
“My professor David Eisenhower led the way with deciding on what the panel would be about,” Corman told The Daily Pennsylvanian. “And then I decided to go ahead and find the people for [the panel]. It was something that I was not necessarily aware at the beginning of the course that I’d be doing … but I became this student leader of the class."
Corman will host a panel on the same topic at the DNC in Chicago next week.
The panel, titled Election Keystone: 2024 Pennsylvania Statewide and Down Ballot Races, focused on Pennsylvania’s significant influence in shaping the outcome of the Presidential elections in the past and present as a swing state. It featured prominent Republican strategists and political analysts including U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), Pennsylvania state Sen. Greg Rothman, and strategists Andy Reilly and Brad Todd.
“Pennsylvania holds this deep responsibility in electing the president of the United States,” Corman said. “I believe that in recent history, no Democrat has won the presidential race without winning Pennsylvania. And I think that even if there were Republican candidates who won the election without Pennsylvania, it holds such a key power with its electoral votes and things along those lines. So I thought, well, we’re from Penn — might as well make that Pennsylvania connection.”
Margolies highlighted the course’s hands-on approach to learning by recalling a memorable encounter from a previous convention.
“We’re at the convention in Boston years ago, and we were invited to all these fundraising parties, and there was a senator walking around, and I walked over to him, I said, ‘Would you mind coming over and talking to the class?’ And it was Barack Obama,” she said.
Corman and the Penn Annenberg team are now looking ahead to their panel at the DNC.
Margolies, a long-time expert on the Democratic National Convention, looks forward to taking the students there again this year.
“It’s so interesting because there have been a lot of changes this year; it would be an excellent learning opportunity for the students,” she said. “There is just such an exciting energy in the air.”
Corman echoed her sentiments and referenced her success at the RNC.
“I was really lucky to have such a great support system around me,” she said. “And that’s what I’m going to do at the DNC, now, too. I just want to make it as appealing as I can for the students. Because at the end of the day, this is fun for me, but the students matter the most in this.”
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