Most college students experience only one presidential election as undergraduates, so the Tribune decided to register this generation-defining moment. Our reporters gauged campus enthusiasm before and after the 2024 election with the intent of attending the inauguration—no matter the victor—to compare the environments.
As students escaped the waning summer heat to fill the seats of Professor Eitan Hersh’s American Conservatism course, murmurs of “Trump said what?!” and “Kamala would never!” filled the air. In anticipation of a reputedly contentious class, pugnacious students were stimulated by the controversial content and looming presidential election. The syllabus, in part, traces the development of the American conservative movement from Cold War fusionism to Trumpian populism. Thus, students examined the philosophy and psychology of the man and party challenging another term of Democrat control of the executive. Compelled by natural curiosity regarding the intersection between course themes and the election, Hersh decided to poll students informally for their election predictions. With a show of hands, about 70% expected Harris to triumph.
“My elections class had a much higher rate of students saying they thought Harris was going to win,” he recalled. No matter the precise proportion, the margins were striking. Based on Tufts’ reputation for left-wing students, these votes were not from Trump supporters bracing for defeat. Rather, the effervescent campus saw droves of students activate in support of Harris. The election offered a chance to make history. Organizations like Tufts Democrats capitalized on the enthusiasm, providing platforms for students to join a winning cause.
For Zach Zinman (’27), president of Tufts Democrats, the zeal was evident in his organization’s debate watch party: Over 400 students attended, eager to spectate the verbal melee with their peers. “Some people were watching a [presidential] debate for the first time,” Zinman said. However, the election spawned more than just detached political observers. Zinman notes that the Tufts Democrats organized “phone banking twice a week in North Carolina, and even on Election Day in Pennsylvania,” where 60 eager students banded with like-minded advocates for the final electoral push. “We got a lot of people involved.”
While the increased political engagement in the lead-up to the election could reflect the desire to support the winning team (an indubitably gratifying position), Hersh believes it represented a gnawing insecurity. “I don’t think [most Harris-supporting students] were confident,” Hersh notes. In 2016, on the other hand, he recalls that the presumption of a Clinton victory sparked a dismissiveness toward the mere notion that Trump could win. After Trump’s first upset—which was fresh in America’s collective memory—few could find solace in polls and predictions.
Despite being a twice-impeached convicted felon, Trump has remained a stubborn political anomaly. After Harris received the nomination, she enjoyed a considerable polling bump—far outpacing Biden’s 2024 numbers. However, after months on the campaign trail and two assassination attempts, Trump once again knocked on the White House door. Students wondered how someone with his track record, openly vowing to serve as a “dictator on day one,” could win the election, especially after a decisive defeat four years earlier. At Tufts CIVIC’s meeting on election night, most attendees predicted Harris would carry the contest. Some cited Trump’s aforementioned ignominy, while others highlighted his opposition to minority groups, and one participant pointed to voting trends in Osceola County, Florida, as an augur for Harris’ victory.
This optimism carried over to Tufts’ Election Night Extravaganza, where hundreds of students filed in to watch live election coverage. The cacophony of students laughing, chatting, and strategizing drowned out the professors who had attended to deliver political commentary.
The room erupted in applause when CNN called Massachusetts for Harris. Yet, enthusiasm momentarily deflated when the same station called Florida, including Osceola County, for Trump. Reese Reckles (’28), a first-time voter, sensed an “anxious energy for some people” that increased as the returns suggested Trump outperforming expectations.
The anxiety never dissipated. The optimism of election night faded, and a second Trump term reified. “After a loss like that, it’s pretty devastating for a lot of people,” Zinman said. What seemed like disappointment among students to Zinman, however, seemed like mere “surprise” to Hersh. He recalls that students this November “did not have a kind of emotional reaction compared to students from eight years ago,” when he was a faculty member at Yale. Part of the muted response stems from familiarity: “Even though students today were children [in 2016], they know that this has happened before, and [Trump] is a familiar person.”
However, the mere fact of Trump’s victory did not singularly stultify the campus—it was how he won, too. “Nearly every single county shifted toward Trump, and the biggest shifts were in Democratic places,” Hersh said. Maybe the instinctual response to the result was stemming self-reflection, not despondency: “I think [the election result] compelled students to think, ‘Oh, there’s maybe something I’m missing.’”
If Hersh is correct, then perhaps the increased self-reflection has prompted the decrease in attendance that Zinman has noticed since November. The Tufts Democrats have maintained a robust slate of programming, though their focus has temporarily shifted to state politics, which includes a lobbying session at the Statehouse. Zinman blames the decreased engagement on the fact that an election season is in the rearview, and hopes that Trump’s divisive agenda will galvanize students to the levels of participation that marked the 2024 election season.
Yet, Zinman entreats the Democratic Party to the same self-reflection that Hersh discerned among the student body in the election’s immediate aftermath. “The Democratic Party will need to adjust their messaging,” Zinman argues. To reform party policy as something more than an opposition to Trump and the Republicans, he suggests that the Democrats champion hawkishness toward China, healthcare reform, and engagement with social security.
Zinman’s prescription elides the identity politics that has pervaded the Democratic platform over the last decade, while Hersh believes these policies must form the basis of Democratic self-reflection. “You can see Democrats being in a very bad place because they lost a narrative about them helping the little guy. The little guy doesn’t vote for it. That was true in 2016 and 2020, but it just keeps going.” In response, the party has refocused itself to construct a “multi-racial coalition.” Despite Biden’s 2020 win—which was bolstered by high-volume working-class and minority votes—Trump siphoned off a substantial proportion of these key constituencies, outperforming his 2016 and 2020 margins. The election results, Hersh predicts, will spark self-reflection regarding how the party can regroup and “make the bleeding stop.”
The modern Democratic coalition can no longer be taken for granted. Instead of being roused into immediate protest, of the kind that Hersh observed in 2016, students were “bummed,” according to Zinman. Reflection and regrouping seemed to be prerequisites to any further political action.
To ameliorate their messaging and augment recently diminished shares of minority and working-class votes from around the country, Democrats might want to start at a Trump rally.
On the eve of the inauguration in Washington, D.C., temperatures hovered around 10 degrees. At 12 a.m., our reporter was in line to enter the Capital One Arena, where there would be a live transmission of Trump’s swearing-in ceremony. About 60 people were lined up by our reporter’s arrival, and thousands more joined as the night progressed toward the 7 a.m. security check.
Luis Garcia from Kansas stood beside two friends. The previous night, they unsuccessfully waited in line for eight hours to witness Trump’s rally at the arena. This time, they arrived at midnight to ensure their entry. It was Garcia’s first time out of Kansas, and he had no intention of ever leaving again: “I’m only here for President Trump. Otherwise, I would rather stay back home with my family.” Garcia, 20, commutes an hour to Kansas State with his two best friends, whom he met growing up in church. Despite his love for home, Garcia said he could not have passed on the opportunity to see Trump speak, asserting, “It’s the greatest political comeback ever. I could hardly sleep on the bus here. Once he took that bullet, I told my family I would make the journey if he was elected.”
A sophomore, Garcia said he grew up with Trump as the face of the conservative movement. Hailing from an entirely Hispanic family, Garcia said, “Trump is the best candidate for Latinos. I go to a Spanish evangelical church, and everyone voted for him. No other candidate, Republican or Democrat, would be able to do this.” When asked about his view on Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, he explained, “While it is true that my family are immigrants, the reason why my grandparents came to America was for its values and virtues. Trump wants to save America and not throw it away like the Democrats.” Garcia worries, in fact, that the influx of foreign labor would make it harder for him to obtain a decent job after graduation.
A blanket-enveloped child lay on the asphalt as Garcia spoke these words. Upon further inspection, it was a boy of no more than seven years old with only his eyes unprotected from the winter freeze. Before the boy’s face flashed a smartphone, propped on a water bottle, showing Minecraft gameplay. The boy’s father routinely replaced his hand and foot warmers. On his third check-in with his son, who snoozed as his YouTube video ended, Mark told the Tribune, “It’s probably irresponsible to bring Danny here, but it’s worth it. President Trump’s victory wasn’t only for the adults in line; it’s for our kids, too. As a veteran, I know Trump can fix all of Biden’s mistakes that made us a laughingstock. I took all of that really personally.”
As the night progressed and the windchill grew, Sam, from Burnsville, Minnesota, returned to the queue with bags of McDonalds coffee and nuggets to distribute to the crowd. Accustomed to the cold, and cheerfully offering charity to those around him, Sam said he was politically apathetic prior to the 2024 election. He explained his political awakening, “I think I took our country for granted. I didn’t care for politics until Trump announced his blanket tariffs. My whole family worked in manufacturing until those jobs got shipped overseas.” Sam emphasized that he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist or a common MAGA caricature. “I’m just a normal guy,” he said, smiling, while distributing hot food and drinks.
There was an underlying theme among the many interviews conducted in line and in the Capital One Arena: a resignation with life and a deposit of faith in Donald Trump. Their struggles were real, and they looked to national politics—particularly, a felonious, spray-tanned, celebrity-turned-politician—to deliver them from these ills.
Charles, a father of two from Texas who works an office job, said, “I’m tired of the H.R. culture that has taken over America. Democrats have passive-aggressively made Americans ashamed of their identities and lineage…In the end, the longhouse’s goal isn’t the equality of different identity groups; they just want to shame some of us to exalt others. Trump broke through. Look around, all groups are here.” Charles recalled his own run-in with this “H.R. culture,” citing a raunchy joke, which he abstained from telling the Tribune, that ultimately cost him his job.
Suzy, who immigrated from China over three decades ago, traveled to D.C. from Pennsylvania because she felt that Trump would restore the value of American individual agency and the efficacy of the American Dream. She purported, “This is a different country from when I arrived. Back then, if you fought, you could win and prosper. Now, more and more obstacles are placed in our path. I had college kids knocking on my door for weeks asking me to vote for Kamala Harris, saying she and Democrats love Asians. Asians only want a fair fight, not to be treated like children. Donald Trump will treat us like adults.” She cited his economic policies as favorable to small businesses like hers, which recently closed its doors after 20 years due to what she called “Biden-flation.”
Now, under the comfort of apricity and street vendors selling foot warmers, the crowd rejoiced at the sight of Secret Service agents lining up at the security checkpoint. They broke into multiple renditions of the national anthem, led by a man dressed as Uncle Sam and evoking Trump’s assassination attempt via a bandage on his right ear. They did not stop singing or chanting until they left Capital One over 12 hours later. The overflowing arena erupted many times over the rest of the day: the sight of Trump’s swearing-in, the words of his inauguration speech, Barron Trump’s wave to the crowd, and the news of fresh executive orders. Yet nothing compared to the ecstasy among the crowd upon Trump’s arrival. The man who walked down the golden escalator almost ten years ago now offered to subsume their personal struggles into his. Tears abounded at the sight of the newly inaugurated 47th President.
Whether or not they are right to cast their pains onto Trump’s national crusade, the individuals who spoke to the Tribune (many of whom were not included in the article) brought diverse perspectives that, peculiarly, they thought only a New York billionaire could speak to. In the process of self-reflection, as Hersh describes it, Democrats will undoubtedly contend with the unexpected diversity of Trump’s coalition.
Hersh hopes that students will transform their surprise at the eroding minority and working-class vote into a reflection that will “help them understand these dynamics and learn about party coalitions.” If, as Zinman notes, “It’s no secret that [Tufts] leans left,” then Democratic students will likely have to look beyond the bounds of the campus to understand their coalition’s erosion, and how to regain their trust and support. This exploration need not require one to attend Trump’s inauguration, but that would certainly be a start.
Photo by The Tufts Tribune