By Catherine Brown-
After several days of counting votes, Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States. As expected, student voters at U of L have mixed reactions about the results.
For four days, voters anticipated election results from swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada that managed to put Biden in the lead.
Once all the ballots were counted, including those sent by mail, the remaining states, including Pennsylvania and Nevada, were finally called in Biden’s favor. As of Nov. 10, Biden holds 290 electoral votes, while Trump has 214.
North Carolina, Georgia and Alaska have yet to be called, but it’s impossible for Trump to make up the missing electoral votes.
“I’m ecstatic that Biden has won the election. I can not wait to protest against him the second he’s inaugurated,” Lorenzo Rowan, a sophomore who voted for Biden said. “I plan to hold him to account on every policy he has proposed to help improve the lives of working people.”
Ian McCall, a sophomore, voted for Trump.
“I’m not surprised by the outcome in the presidential race,” McCall said. “Trump won his first term because he appealed to people’s worries about the economy.”
McCall said that in the case of a divided Congress, “The government can get back to doing what it does best. Nothing.”
Christopher Borick, a professor of political science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, found that supporters for Biden were less enthusiastic about his candidacy than supporters for Trump, with only 49% of Biden voters showing enthusiastic support compared to 82% for Trump.
“Joe Biden is not the darling of voters,” Borick said. “In the end, there was enough enthusiasm against Trump that even if people weren’t in love with Joe Biden, they certainly were able to vote for him.”
According to a telephone interview of 419 likely voters in Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates for Congress are preferred over their Republican opponents.
The same interview, conducted by researchers at Muhlenberg College, found that top issues concerning voters in Pennsylvania were the economy, healthcare and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hilary Beaumont, a writer for Aljazeera, attributes Biden’s win to a combination of factors including Biden’s appeal to the white working-class voters who were disappointed by Trump. Beaumont claims that Biden managed to appeal to suburban voters in Pennsylvania districts previously upset by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Additionally, Biden has roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which helped him lead in Lackawanna County.
The Trump administration announced that it would file lawsuits in states with a slim Democratic lead, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. The lawsuits were sent to state and federal courts in these states to either stop counting mail-in ballots or recount the ballots.
Law officials say a recount is unlikely to change the results of the states involved.
Let’s see what the next four years have to offer.
File Graphic // The Louisville Cardinal
