On November 10, students from Political Science 322: Introduction to American Politics hosted a roundtable discussion on the aftermath of the American presidential election two days prior. I’d been planning to attend all week with the expectation of a straightforward evening. Like most pollsters and pundits, I’d anticipated election night to be a straightforward ordeal, with Hillary Clinton defeating Donald Trump and proving that his recklessly offensive campaign was too much for even the more conservative American voters. When it turned out we were all horribly mistaken and almost the entirety of Canada fell into a stupor, one silver lining did stick in my mind: this talk on Thursday just got interesting.
The students putting on the event were caught just as off-guard as the rest of us. They’d been planning the discussion since the second week of classes, but a Trump victory was one possibility that hadn’t been addressed in as much detail as the alternative. One speaker joked as the panel began that the results meant a lot of work had required “let’s not say revisions, [but] lots of additions.” Speaking of speakers, the panel was made up of around 15 students from a range of backgrounds, including several Americans. While a few seemed more comfortable speaking and dominated the conversations, all of them spoke at least briefly on one of the many topics that came up over the two-and-a-half hour discussion.
The first topic discussed was the transition between Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and the differences in their policy. After calling for a round of applause for Obama’s successes, one speaker referenced NPR research that found the American people like his personal touch, and often referred to him like a friend. It was “Obama did this, Obama did that,” he explained, rather than attributing decisions to the vague entity of the government. However, another statistic showed that Obama’s term was not universally beloved — while black Americans overall felt that race relations had improved under his administration, the majority of white respondents thought they had worsened.
Unsurprisingly, this was far from the last mention of race during the evening. After an audience poll verified that aforementioned shock at Trump’s victory, the panel explained that documentary filmmaker Michael Moore had predicted it, saying that this would be “the last stand of the angry white man” in a blog post weeks before the election. Trump’s plays to racist, xenophobic voters proved successful, and the impacts of those appeals were far reaching. One panelist theorized on how he won despite those stances, when a surface assumption would be that non-white voters would flock to Clinton to keep Trump out of the White House. “Me being Hispanic, I felt terrible for my siblings,” she explained. “Why would these voters vote for Trump?” One often overlooked angle brought up is that prejudice exists within Latino communities themselves. Groups from one country or region are just as capable of isolationist stances as their white neighbours, leading to support of Trump’s infamous border wall proposal. Many Latino communities are also highly religious, which can correlate with agreement on Trump’s stances against abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Another panelist had a personal story to share of the fear that comes with being an immigrant. A Filipino immigrant to England, she was told on Facebook, by a man with the same background, that if she didn’t agree with Trump and the similar sentiments that fueled the U.K.’s Brexit vote, she should get out of the country. Little did he know, she joked, that she was “safely tucked away in Canada.” But she used the story to illustrate even though the man was also an immigrant, still in the process of getting his citizenship, he bought into the powerful “us not them” mentality. The hostility didn’t just come from the public, either. When she lived in England her brother had dated an undocumented immigrant, and that girlfriend had used the speaker’s address for government forms. One day the government came knocking on her door, demanding to know if the girlfriend lived there. “The experience was horrifying,” the speaker recounted, relating it to the possibility that may soon face hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, as well as their friends and family, in the United States.
Of course, Trump’s win did not happen in a vacuum, and significant attention was also given to Hillary Clinton. The panel agreed that while feminist ideals were on the rise (a poll of the audience found a sizable majority self-identified as feminists), Clinton’s particular brand of feminism lacked the intersectionality of later feminist ideals, focusing more on just feminine empowerment without much consideration for the roles race and class took in social positioning. In addition, the panel saw Clinton as taking voters for granted. They thought she assumed she’d get the young voters, the racial minorities, and the women, so she only had to appeal to white men by tearing down Trump rather than making promises for those other demographics. However, as one panelist pointed out, “Feminism isn’t monolithic, and women aren’t monolithic. They didn’t all vote for her just because she was a woman.” And as the results showed, clearly she didn’t succeed at appealing to enough people to secure the presidency.
However, while American voters as a whole may not have been ready for another four years from a progressive candidate, their other decisions on November 8 showed a surprising amount of progressive opinions. Towards the end of the discussion, Professor Michelle Rhodes joined in the conversation, pointing out that Americans didn’t just vote for a president, they voted for ballot initiatives. “The American population is not as divided as we see,” she said. “They’re divided in the symbolism.” Of all the states with ballot initiatives on the legalization of recreational or medical marijuana, only one failed to pass. California passed a law requiring background checks for ammunition purchases. Oklahomans voted to end government spending for religious purposes. “Donald Trump was just one choice that people made,” Rhodes explained. “There were a lot of other choices on the ballots.”
That was the sentiment the discussion closed with — as a few audience members asked questions and the tone turned more casual, the mood also lightened. Sure, an unexpected and, to most attendees, unfortunate outcome had shocked the world two days earlier. But it wasn’t without its silver linings. “I think the greatest benefit,” summarized one speaker, “and I say this with a lot of reluctance, is putting forward a lot of conversations … like masculinity, sexual violence, feminism, race … I hope that Donald Trump serves as an impetus of change for the positive, even if the ways he does it are negative.”
Jeff was The Cascade's Editor in Chief for the latter half of 2022, having previously served as Digital Media Manager, Culture & Events Editor, and Opinion Editor. One time he held all three of those positions for a month, and he's not sure how he survived that. He started at The Cascade in 2016.
