A group of students led the push to file paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on behalf of former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel after hearing about the him on "Chapo Trap House." | Alex Wong/Getty Images 2020 elections ‘Do you know how old I am?’: Teens draft Gravel to run for president The teenagers filed exploratory paperwork this week for Gravel, a former Alaska senator.

Mike Gravel, the two-term former Democratic senator from Alaska who left elected office in 1981, is running for president. Kind of.

Late Tuesday night, a Gravel exploratory committee filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, setting off a cascade of Twitter commentary and accusations that the filing was simply a bit of trolling by teenage students.


The filing was the brainchild of teenagers — but they had the senator’s blessing.

“They asked me if it was okay, I said they could do what they wanted, as long as they were doing it and not me!” Gravel joked in a brief interview with POLITICO.

Gravel and the teens are an odd match at first glance: He has been out of the Senate for roughly double the time his young organizers have been alive.

“When they first approached me, I responded, ‘Do you know how old I am?’” said Gravel, who is 88.

But the students said they were attracted to Gravel after hearing about the senator on "Chapo Trap House," a left-leaning podcast. The organizers said they were drawn to Gravel's beliefs on foreign policy specifically, as well as the promotion of direct democracy initiatives by the senator who famously read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record.

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“Obviously he has been out of politics for a long time, but there’s no reason he had to stay out,” said David Oks, a high school senior who is leading the pro-Gravel effort. “We pitched it to him as a way to get the Democratic Party to move towards views that are more moral, more sensible in many ways.”

Gravel already ran for the White House once, in the 2008 campaign, when he excoriated America’s history of military intervention while sharing a stage with Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. After not gaining much traction — despite his infamously avant garde campaign ads, including one which featured Gravel staring silently at the camera before throwing a large rock into a lake and walking off — Gravel tried and failed to win the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination.

This also isn’t the teenagers’ first time wading into politics. Oks ran for mayor of his town in Westchester County, New York in 2017 , and his campaign was staffed by many of his friends who are now all in on the “Gravel Gang.”

“He and I have always been interested in getting involved in politics, before anyone told us we were allowed to,” said Henry Williams, a college freshman who was Oks’ mayoral campaign manager.

The odd couple of octogenarian ex-senator and teenaged supporters aren’t blind to Gravel's longer-than-long shot odds to win anything in 2020 — but they say that's not the point. Instead, they want to get him into the early Democratic presidential primary debates.

“[They] had the idea I should run not to win, but to expose ideas, particularly on direct democracy,” Gravel said. “We had no pretensions that we would win.”

To make their quixotic push to the debate stage, the group is hoping to use a similar strategy to other underdogs : generate attention online to get to 65,000 individual donors, one of the thresholds for qualification for the first debate set by the Democratic National Committee. Since the Gravel exploratory paperwork was discovered, Gravel’s Twitter account has been on a warpath, bashing Democrats for being insufficiently liberal.

And no, Gravel himself is not the one doing the tweeting. It is the students: “The caustic style and affinity for memes, that’s more representative of high schoolers than former senators,” Oks said.

The organizers, who initially pitched Gravel on the run with a policy memo, are flying out to California in April to convince him to to go from an exploratory committee to a full-on run. (“They need to persuade my wife,” Gravel said.) They have been in constant contact with Gravel over the last day.

They also said hundreds of people have reached out to voice support, emboldening the ragtag team. “He’s excited there’s a market for these ideas,” Williams said. “He said he’s far more interested than he was a couple days ago.”

But even that small measure of success comes at a price.

"I have to go back to school in like a week, and I have to manage this thing,” Oks sighed.