Micah Mahjoubian, SPA/BA ’96, chief of staff for Pennsylvania state senator Sharif Street, can pinpoint the moment he developed a penchant for politics. 

He came to AU from his native Keystone State to study international relations with a focus on Russia. But after volunteering for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and getting “swept up in the excitement” of the Democrats’ first presidential victory in a dozen years, Mahjoubian’s interests began to shift. 

“When I picked up the Washington Post every day, I started skipping over the international news and going straight to the political stories,” he says. “That’s when I knew.”

Mahjoubian switched his major to communications, legal institutions, economics, and government. He served as president of the AU College Democrats, interned at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and worked on a handful of campaigns. 

As his resume expanded, so did his collection of campaign buttons—souvenirs of his volunteer work and his newfound passion for politics. After taking a road trip with college friends to the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mahjoubian returned with enough buttons to fill one small bulletin board.

“I got more buttons and more bulletin boards—and more buttons,” says Mahjoubian, whose collection now comprises more than 5,000 pins, from FDR to LBJ to AOC.

He’s particularly interested in buttons from Pennsylvania races and LGBTQ+ candidates—six Harvey Milk pins are among his most prized pins. Mahjoubian also collects “early career buttons,” for example, from President Barack Obama’s first Illinois Senate race in 1996. He finds pins on eBay and trades them with other enthusiasts through the American Political Items Collectors, which he joined in 2020. 

“I like that each button represents a story,” Mahjoubian says.

His own political story has come full circle. After graduating from AU, Mahjoubian returned to Philadelphia to run campaigns and notched his first win in 1999 with Mayor John Street, for whom he worked as a fundraising and finance coordinator. Mahjoubian held several positions in city government before being named policy director for Street’s son, Sharif, a state senator since 2016 and the first Black chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. 

“When I was young, there was this passion, this spark about politics, and I was lucky enough to make a career out of it,” Mahjoubian says. “The goal of politics is to change people’s lives for the better. My passion for that has never [waned].”