Some AACC students said this week they are disappointed in former President Donald Trump’s victory.
An informal Campus Current poll revealed that more than 70% of students are not happy that Trump, a Republican, won Tuesday’s election for president, beating Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, for the office.
Adebola Afariogun, a second-year computer science student, said he is disappointed with the 2024 election results because Harris is “100% a better candidate.”
“She’s not the one with 34 active felony charges or sexual assault cases,” Afariogun, a Harris voter, said. “She’s clean and she’s a good person.”
Maria Bell, a first-year computer science student, agreed, saying, “Trump’s an idiot.”
“It’s probably going to get a lot scarier for marginalized people,” Bell said. “I heard [Trump] was excited about whatever project 2025 [is].”
Tabitha Broomfield, a third-year game art and design student, disagreed.
“I genuinely think that President Trump will be good for this country,” Broomfield, a Trump voter, said. “Even though a lot of Americans hate him, he genuinely wants what’s best for the American people.”
Sophia Trammell, a dual-enrolled student who said she voted for Trump, said she expected Harris to do a lot better.
“I was not expecting it to be as sweeping of a victory as it was,” Trammell said. “I will say I do feel kind of bad for Kamala Harris [because] she only really had, like, two to three months to campaign. And I think that was a serious strategic error on the part of the Democratic party.”
Political science professor Dan Nataf said Harris lost the election because of “a generalized feeling that the Biden administration had not acted in a decisive and clear-minded way on the inflation front. That’s what I think lost the election [for Harris].”
Nataf said because voters preferred the economy during Trump’s presidency compared with the Biden and Harris administration, “that was enough” to shift the election in Trump’s favor.
“Harris was trying to say, ‘Let’s not go back, let’s look forward,’ but people didn’t buy it,” Nataf said. “They wanted to look back into the Biden years and compare it to the Trump years, and on inflation, which was the critical factor for Trump, the [cumulative] inflation pre-COVID was 7% for Trump. The inflation during the Biden years is 20% cumulative … so people say, ‘I don’t know whether his policies were any good, but I know I like the outcome.’”
