When the polls closed at 8 p.m. on Nov. 5, Election Day, students and faculty made the transition from being active participants in democracy to diligent observers of the vote tally. As the results came in, the Swarthmore community experienced a fresh wave of emotions, both anxious and optimistic, regarding the outcome of the 2024 election.
Students could be found holed up in classrooms with electoral maps projected onto the screen, soundtracked by heated debates about what counties could still swing their way. Others attended the Election Night Watch Party hosted by SwatVotes and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility in the Kemp Family Commons to watch CNN coverage of the national election results while conversing in small groups.
At the watch party, some students seemed hopeful that Pennsylvania would go blue. Natassia Lowe ’25 was bewildered by the Republican Party’s confidence so early on, especially given the voting makeup of Philadelphia: “I just think it’s kind of crazy … the polls are not showing [a Trump lead], and I’m pretty sure with Philadelphia having strong[holds] like [the University of Pennsylvania], all these different colleges and such, you would not expect that to happen.”
Others were viewing the updates less optimistically. In a retrospectively prophetic comment, one watch party attendee, Ella Strickler ’27, said that she hadn’t “really been able to consider the alternative all day,” and that she was “nervous about Pennsylvania.” She noted that “it’s always alarming to see Trump get the early leads when the first few states come in” and was waiting for the bump in votes for Kamala Harris from states like California and New York.
By the following morning, however, the anticipation came to an end. At 5:34 a.m., Donald J. Trump won Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes and secured the presidency for a second, non-consecutive term. This outcome seemed increasingly likely to students as he picked up swing state after swing state, but was nonetheless a shock to many Swarthmore students when the final result was declared.
As the Swarthmore community came to terms with the news, an outpouring of resources flooded their inboxes. Some professors canceled classes, the Office of Student Engagement encouraged students to use Sharples Commons as a “safe space to land,” and the department of political science promoted its pre-scheduled panel discussion set for Wednesday afternoon, “Election Night 2024: What Just Happened and What’s to Come.” The panel was highly attended, with the Scheuer Room overflowing with students, faculty, and administration members, including President Val Smith.
Panel members included political science faculty members Keith Reeves, Ben Berger, Susie Schwarz, and Warren Snead, and Associate Professor of Sociology Daniel Laurison. Berger, the moderator for the event, started off by clarifying that the panelists were not going to be “making sense of everything” given the complexity of election night and the short turnaround since. Instead, his first question focused on Trump’s win in Pennsylvania, specifically regarding the discrepancy between the Harris campaign’s seemingly stronger fundamentals (ground game, infrastructure, fundraising, etc.) and her ultimate loss.
Reeves responded by looking at the broader context of Trump winning in 90% of the counties across the U.S. (he won about 77% of them in 2020) and stated that “the country has taken a rightward turn” in a way that cannot be fully understood yet. He listed other perplexing issues, such as the codification of abortion rights in certain states that simultaneously voted for a candidate who appointed the justices who overturned Roe vs. Wade and the growing share of the Hispanic and Latino vote for Trump, despite his disparaging comments toward the populations.
Snead elaborated on Reeves’s first point, saying that “Pennsylvania, while very important to all of us, is not immune to national trends.” He, and later Schwarz, then discussed the lack of effectiveness that a focus on policy seems to have on voters, and the gaps in the Democratic Party’s message.
Laurison concluded the first round of conversation by reminding the audience that, in the past four elections, the popular vote was generally won with a bare majority but because of the Electoral College and winner-take-all system, results differed greatly due to a small number of votes. So while each presidential election seems to indicate a dramatic shift in voter ideology, wins reflect an individual leader and not the makeup of the driving political forces. He referenced a point he made in the aftermath of the 2016 election, saying that “the country is not a radically different country than it was two days ago or four years ago.”
Reeves then noted that this was the third presidential election in a row where polling data was off, this time by about three to four percent, which resulted in an underestimation of Trump’s support. He contended that, “there will be a reckoning among polling survey research professionals in terms of why and how we got it so wrong.”
A common point of conversation throughout was voters’ motivations for selecting Trump. Snead highlighted Trump’s 2016 strategy of packaging economic policies in a way that differed from “the way that [2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt] Romney did before.” Trump appealed to everyday working Americans by promising to counteract free trade with tariffs and restrict immigration, resulting in “a rhetorical shift,” Snead explained. Professor Laurison spoke to the fact that some voters are attracted to Trump because they characterize him as “somebody who pisses off the elites.” He also touched on a widening divide between two sides of U.S. politics that is defined by class and higher education and the need to reconcile with the reality of people’s perspectives. Berger supplemented this point with a comment about how Trump voters like the fact that he tells them what they believe to be a larger truth about elites, and gives voice to their discontent.
Other topics of discussion during the panel included the role the media played in swaying voters, as well as voting trends of various demographics including young men ages 18-29, individuals without college degrees, and the business elites of corporate America. Many of these were suggested by members of the panel’s audience through an informal Q&A.
The final question of the night touched on a personal element of the Harris campaign: her demographic background. An audience member asked, “What would have happened in this election, every single thing being equal, if Kamala Harris had been a middle-aged tall white guy with blonde hair?” Schwarz answered with evidence from her own paper entitled, “What Have We Learned About Gender From Candidate Choice Experiments? A Meta-analysis of 67 Factorial Survey Experiments,” published in 2022 in the Journal of Politics. Her findings suggest that “it’s not the case that voters … systemically disproportionately discriminate against female candidates.” However, she added that this does not eliminate the possibility that individual female candidates are discriminated against “once they are on the ballot and have a face and an actual personality and God forbid, opinions.” She ended by affirming that it is reasonable for voters to jump to that conclusion because, “[Trump] ran three times, two times he won against women … and he lost against an old white man.”
The panelists offered nuanced insight into what continues to be a tumultuous political landscape by creating a common space to parse through the developments of election night.
The panel offered a space for discourse between faculty and students alike. Professor Berger offered, “We already saw some assumptions that often take place in academia be challenged during the election … What I’d like to ask people is: what can we learn? What does it tell us, if anything, about politics?”
Great article, the gender analysis is like bigger than anyone can imagine. A study on how teachers ask more questions and have higher expectations for boys, comes to mind.
Even female teachers that had just been trained to spread the wealth, continued to ask boys more questions..