Students react to drawn-out election
November 9, 2016
A few hundred WSU faculty, staff and students sat in the CUB to watch the 2016 Election results Tuesday night.
The CUB Election Result Watch Party started at 4 p.m. as a part of the Cougs Vote campaign to encourage WSU students to get more involved in the political process, said Ben Calabretta, associate director of the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE).
Calabretta said the WSU campus ballot box was completely full. There were several thousand ballots submitted, he said, and the candidates running this year have something to do with it.
Shane Spencer, sophomore political science major, is a supporter of Republican candidate Donald Trump.
“If Trump wins, there will be a lot of change,” Spencer said. “Clinton is for consistency but Trump will help us in the long run.”
Should Trump win, Spencer said he will probably keep the rejoicing internal because of the large number of Democrats in the CUB.
Spencer said he thinks the left has blown Trump’s issues out of proportion. They say he will be a dictator but those fears aren’t justified, he said.
Sarah Webber, freshman psychology major, said she is against Trump completely. She said she is feeling uneasy and scared.
“I kind of want to throw up, you know?” she said.
Connor Lui, a freshman communications major, said he voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
“I feel like Hillary messed up with the silent majority of Trump supporters,” Liu said.
Liu said Clinton didn’t appeal to people living in rural areas, only to people in the cities.
“I’m not going to throw chairs out the window, but I’m sure someone is going to do that,” he said.
Brian Hensley, a junior business management major, voted for Clinton and said he was not going to be too happy if Trump wins.
“I heard the Canadian immigration website actually crashed halfway through this,” Hensley said.
Ty Bjornson, junior microbiology major, is Canadian and couldn’t vote in the election.
“I’m just here for the ride,” Bjornson said. “It’s kind of like a rollercoaster where they forgot to give you seatbelts.”
He said there is a dating website that matches single Canadians with Americans, because Americans are eligible for Canadian citizenship if they marry a Canadian.
“It’s a get-out-of-Trump-land-free card,” he said.
Maya Manus, a senior political science major, said she already knew how this election was going to go.
“I knew from the 2012 numbers that 2016 would be more in the middle,” Manus said.
Devlyn Tobin, a junior chemical engineering major, said he is happy for how close the race is, because it makes it more exciting.
There was really no good candidate, Tobin said.
“Unfortunately, it came down to voting for who you hate the least,” he said, when the election is supposed to be about voting for who you like the most.