SPECIAL NOTE FOR EDITORS: Press credentials are available for all Mock Convention events. Please see the contacts below to request a press pass or for additional information. Further details can be found here.

Jon Huntsman to Address Washington and Lee's Mock Convention

Former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman will address Washington and Lee University’s Mock Convention on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012.

Huntsman dropped out of the presidential race on Jan. 16, after he finished third in the New Hampshire primaries.  Huntsman is the former governor of Utah and the former U.S. ambassador to China.

Huntsman's speech at the evening session on Friday adds to an impressive array of speakers, including the opening-night speech by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, presentations by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and U.S. House Majority Leader and Virginia Representative Eric Cantor, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, and former Oklahoma Representative J.C. Watts, plus the Saturday keynote by former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour.  A full schedule of events is listed below.

The public is invited to attend the event, which will be held in the Warner Center. Tickets are still available on mockconvention.com in limited quantities.

W&L’s Mock Convention is a quadrennial tradition in which students pick the presidential nominee for the party out of power.  Nearly the entire W&L student body, roughly 99 percent of all students, works on the prediction, researching potential candidates, tracking polls and gathering on-the-ground data.  With only two incorrect predictions since 1948, and an overall accuracy rate of over 75 percent, Mock Con has been called “the most realistic” exercise of its kind by Newsweek magazine.

After incorrectly selecting Hillary Clinton as the 2008 Democratic nominee, the students are eager to prove their skills in the upcoming convention.  Speakers of Huntsman’s caliber solidify the convention’s credibility and will ensure that in 2012, the W&L Mock Convention will reaffirm its place as “the biggest and boomingest” of student political organizations (TIME Magazine).

Media Contacts:

Kali McFarland ’12  mcfarlandk12@mail.wlu.edu  (757) 404-1214

Katy Stewart ’13 stewartk13@mail.wlu.edu  (704) 560-2120