The campaign was a protest against the status quo, an expression of voter alienation from a government run by “insiders” for the principal benefit of themselves. We are speaking of course of the Georgetown University Student Association elections, which were held last week. “The system right now is working for them,” said Georgetown senior Matt Gregory, referring to the “insular” coterie of “ambitious” students who tend to dominate GUSA.

Unhappy with this arrangement, Gregory spearheaded a write-in candidacy on behalf of a campus icon. And so it was last Friday that, in a fit of anti-establishment pique, the disaffected students of Georgetown elected to their senate a warm chicken sandwich.

To be precise, it is the Chicken Madness sandwich from Wisemiller’s Grill in Washington, D.C., just steps outside the Georgetown campus. Topped with onions, sweet peppers, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, and more, the sandwich is famously beloved by students, for whom it has become something of an inside joke. In February, Chicken Madness was on the GUSA presidential ticket alongside another Wisey sandwich, Hot Chick. Hot Chick-Chicken Madness received 878 write-in votes and finished second. The winning ticket got 1,383 votes.

This time around, Chicken Madness won one of the four seats representing Georgetown students living off campus, who are primarily seniors. It should be noted that the off-campus elections earned participation of just 9 percent of students living off campus, the Hoya reported, the lowest participation of all the GUSA senate elections—unsurprising given that most seniors living off-campus do not bother to vote in student government elections. The few seniors who did vote, however, took the time to write in the sandwich. GUSA, however, decided to give the seat to senior Alejandro Serrano, a write-in candidate who was not a sandwich.

“I think the sandwich probably best represents the student body more than anyone else running haha,” Serrano wrote in a text to Slate.

Gregory wouldn’t disagree. The Chicken Madness campaign may have been a lark, but the underlying critique was real. GUSA, he said, “promotes policies that it thinks is best and it pats itself on the back when those policies are achieved or doesn’t say anything when they’re not. And I think that there’s a certain group of students that follow GUSA, that care about it, that work for it, that see what it does. But there’s a large, large proportion of students on campus that does not. And that proportion of students, they go about their daily lives, they have fun, they study and do everything a normal Georgetown student would do. GUSA just doesn’t play a part in their lives. So the question is how do you get GUSA to benefit those people? And what it comes down to is, what do they want, what improvements in their lives could happen, and how could this institution of government do that for them?”

He’d even thought through what would’ve happened if Chicken Madness had been allowed to serve. “The plan would be for me to go with the sandwich,” he said, “and I would sit and probably consume the sandwich over the course of the meeting. In all seriousness. And then if there were a picture—a GUSA picture of all the senators—I would probably pose with the sandwich, just to signify that it is both sandwich and man present as representatives here.”

The sandwich’s joke presidential campaign was higher concept. Charlie Lowe, then a senior at Georgetown, ran the campaign along with his roommate, Anirudha Vaddadi. The pair launched the bid in a Facebook event, and continued the joke throughout the semester. During the debates, Vaddadi served as a “sandwich translator,” periodically leaning his ear into the sandwich placed on the podium in the student center and responding “OK,” before relaying the sandwich’s response.

Lowe, who graduated in May, said he was glad to see the sandwich gain a foothold in campus politics. “Personally, I’m just in it for the sandwich puns,” he said in a text to Slate.

The student newspaper, where I previously served as an editor, saw something else in the vote. The Hoya’s editorial board rebuked GUSA for robbing the Chicken Madness of the seat it had won, citing Brexit: “With so few students participating in the vote, there is a clear disengagement and disinterest in student government, especially among seniors. The temporary success of Chicken Madness is proof of this and thus both GUSA and those students who either voted or chose to refrain from voting should live with their decision.” The anti-establishment distemper of the times had arrived on campus, smothered in mayonnaise.

Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.