As secretary and treasurer of their high school class in Philadelphia, Matthew Slutsky said he and his twin brother Peter “ran the show.”

Now, after graduating from Northeastern with political science degrees in September, the brothers have gone on to work for John Kerry’s campaign. As field officers, the two spent months in Iowa, getting out the vote and organizing volunteers.

“We both applied, we both, you know, really like Kerry,” Matthew said. “I had [Michael] Dukakis as a professor and this was really inspired by him talking about getting involved in a campaign.”

While at Northeastern, Peter Slutsky worked as an intern for Shannon O’Brien’s campaign, the Democratic candidate for governor in 2002, while Matthew interned on Kerry’s Senate campaign.

“That was where I really got my hands dirty, in this just traveling around with the candidate,” Peter said.

Technically finished with classes in June 2003, Peter and Matthew joined up with the campaign during the summer, returning for commencement in the fall.

During their months in Iowa, they were each put in charge of specific counties where they were to make sure Kerry’s message was received by potential voters.

With Kerry’s surprising win in the Iowa Caucus Jan. 20, the campaign moved east to prepare for the primaries, and the Slutskys jumped on the bandwagon.

“The night after we won Iowa I pretty much jumped in my car and drove to New Hampshire,” Peter said.

For a week in New Hampshire, the campaigns focused their efforts, right up until election day yesterday, where they went as far as to drive people to the polls.

With just hours to go before the final votes were counted, both brothers remained optimistic about Kerry’s chances in the first official primary.

“I really think that if two important states have said that Kerry is worthy of their vote and worthy of their trust, I really think that’s going to spread throughout the country and I really think he could be the nominee,” Matthew said.

After the New Hampshire vote, the brothers hit the road to other states to continue to help out in any way possible.

With primaries in states such as South Carolina and Arizona coming up next week, they know they have plenty of work ahead of them. Still, they are confident in their candidate’s abilities.

“I’ve followed Kerry for many, many years, I think he has an amazing resume and he’s got, I mean, talk about courage. The presidency, you need to have the most able body person and Kerry is courageous and he is intelligent and he’s idealistic; he has these ideas. He’s saying things that really are challenging folks to think beyond what we have right now and I think that he’s electible,” Peter said.

While both brothers hope to secure jobs under Kerry if he does win the nomination and/or the presidency, they know that when working for a campaign, the future is always uncertain.

“If it doesn’t work out, you know, [I will] hope that my Northeastern political science degree is worth something,” Matthew said. “I think Northeastern really does teach you to apply yourself and I was encouraged by professors and by friends to go out and really get involved. I really don’t think I’d be doing this job and in the position to do a lot cooler jobs in the future if I didn’t have Northeastern to encourage me. I never thought I’d say that, but it’s kind of true.”