Last week, the Launch and Empower Parties clashed in the Union at the Dailyer-sponsored ASUN Mass Debate. But one question hung heavy in the air: What happened to last year’s ASUN winners, the Hashtag Party? While we weren’t able to contact any of them directly, here’s what the DailyER’s reporters have been able to find out from the clues they left behind.

John Edwards – After leading the Hashtag Party in their crushing victory over Ignite in last year’s ASUN election, President John Edwards suddenly realized that he had even less of an idea of what the Hashtag Party’s goals were than the student body did. This resulted in an existential crisis for the young president, one which drove him to leave Lincoln for a period of a few months to backpack in India.

Upon his return, Edwards spent the remainder of his term lobbying for the university to let him use official channels to sell a variety of “medicinal” oils and lotions that he’d brought back from his travels.

Rich Kennedy – Following the spending of a huge sum of his family fortune on purchasing student votes for the election, Kennedy was reportedly forced to “scale his spending back a bit”. After his opulent Near South mansion was foreclosed, Kennedy went through a period of spending only tens of thousands of dollars a week instead of hundreds of thousands. He characterizes this experience as “humbling”.

“I realized the foolishness of my actions during the election,” Kennedy later wrote in his memoir. “I discovered that things like power and family come and go, but having a lot of money is way more important.”

Gerald – On the morning after the victory celebration, the other members of the Hashtag Party were surprised to find Gerald’s desk cleaned out. The Internal Vice President had simply disappeared. In the year since, he has been reportedly sighted in cities as far-flung as Tampa and Santa Fe. Nobody knows where he is now, only that wherever he goes, misfortune inevitably follows in his wake.

The last report on his whereabouts came from Kaleb Warner, a trucker who had been driving late last Tuesday night across Interstate 80.

“He was just walking, right there on the shoulder,” Warner told Dailyer reporters. “He had this emptiness about him. He seemed like he’d been walking for such a long time. I asked him where he was going.”

“All he said was ‘My wandering shall last until I find my redemption, or my grave.’”