On Wednesday morning, former president Donald Trump won the 2024 United States presidential election, beating Vice President Kamala Harris and securing a second term in office. Since then, students and faculty members at the Claremont Colleges have expressed mixed reactions.
Trump’s win makes him one of only two chief executives in U.S. history to be elected in nonconsecutive terms. He was elected for the first time in 2016 when he beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by 74 electoral votes. When he lost the election four years later to current President Joe Biden, his refusal to accept the results triggered a violent insurrection at the nation’s Capitol.
In the weeks leading up to this year’s election, experts remained split on who would win, with most expecting a close race. Harris received 226 electoral votes, while Trump received 295, taking six of the nation’s seven swing states. Arizona, the seventh swing state, is still processing ballots but is predicted to also go to Trump.
David J. Menefee-Libey, professor of government and politics at Pomona College, said that he wasn’t surprised by the results of the election.
“We live in a closely divided, negative age and swing voters are hostile to people in power,” he said in an email to TSL. “Trump and Vance were very good at pushing that negativity and ran an effective campaign focused on grievance and resentment … Harris, Walz, and national Democrats ran mostly good campaigns, but it was always going to be tough for them.”
Menefee-Libey added that Trump’s victory could be harmful to institutions like Pomona, saying that Trump, Vance and Republicans across the country “actively scapegoat colleges and universities.” He specifically pointed to Project 2025, a 922-page policy agenda detailing recommendations for Trump’s future administration.
The agenda calls for sweeping changes to the nation’s higher education systems, recommending that the federal government end its student loan programs, restrict college curricula and eliminate Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students and women.
“I hate to see that, because I know from 40-plus years of doing this work that what we do at universities and colleges like Pomona is important and valuable to America,” Menefee-Libey wrote. “It will be hard for us at Pomona to defend ourselves and our friends from those attacks because we are more than a little bit divided and demoralized right now, but that’s a challenge this election has brought to our doorstep.”
While Menefee-Libey said he had expected Republicans to do well in the election, not everyone was so sure. Some students at the Claremont Colleges, where students and faculty members overwhelmingly lean left, said that being in the campus’s “blue bubble” at times led them to believe that the election would turn out in Harris’s favor.
“It seemed that — given all the social media presence and the way that there was this huge energy in the youth behind it — there was a plausible chance of swinging left,” Lexi Duffy PO ’26, a public policy analysis major and co-president of the Claremont Colleges League of Women Voters, said. “I think everyone was so optimistic and excited for the opportunity of the first woman president of color. There was a lot of hope that didn’t turn out to manifest.”
Ella Alpert SC ’26, a dual major in politics and writing and rhetoric, said that she was similarly surprised and that she felt “gutted” and “dehumanized” when the election results came in.
“Deep down, I thought that Kamala would win,” she said. “To me, this speaks to our country’s sexism and racism, and I think that that is the hardest pill for me to swallow.”
She specifically pointed to the high number of young men who voted for Trump. 56 percent of young men voted red in this year’s election, as compared to the 41 percent who voted red in 2020, according to data from the Tufts Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Alpert described this phenomenon as a “slap in the face” and added that she couldn’t help questioning the views of her peers.
“I think I just had more hope that maybe [the election] would go the way I wanted it to go, or that even if I don’t have as much faith in the country, I have faith in people,” she said. “What’s most disappointing to me is to think that my male peers, my white peers — and not just peers, but people across the country — don’t value women, and don’t value women of color in particular.”
Gabriel Dalton PO ’25, a history major, described Trump’s election as “an affirmation of some of [his] most pessimistic beliefs.”
“I feel like all up and down the scale, at the highest level of the global community and also just on the interpersonal level, there are pretty major concerns,” he said. “I mean, what does this even just say about the people I’m around in the real world that they’re willing to support something like this?”
Some students were more optimistic. Shivom Parihar CM ’28 said that while he wasn’t particularly happy about Trump’s victory — citing the president-elect’s “anti-Democratic tendencies” — he wasn’t upset, either.
“I don’t think Trump deserved to win, but I think the Democrats deserved to lose,” he said. “I think we’ve had four years of complete mismanagement in this country…We’ve just seen the complete degradation of the social fabric of this country in the aftermath of the pandemic, and there’s been no attempt to try to rectify that.”
There were some students who were happy about Trump’s victory, though, such as Caden Lewis CM ’28. Referring to himself as a minority in the political landscape of the Claremont Colleges, Lewis said that he had a “good day” after the election results came out.
“I’m excited for everybody,” he said. “I’m excited for my country, I’m excited for my own family, up at home.”
Lewis added that students should stay politically engaged even though the presidential election is over, emphasizing the importance of talking to each other and trying to understand different perspectives and opinions.
“A lot of people seem to cast judgment, perhaps based on political affiliation, and it’s too bad,” he said. “It kind of exemplifies the division in our country.”
Other students similarly called for political engagement.
“The chance to rally behind a specific candidate is over, but the opportunities for rallying behind policies and rallying behind ideas and rallying behind these mass efforts of ideological change, they’re not over,” Duffy said. “So that looks like getting involved in local government, showing up to Claremont City Council meetings and finding local ways to impact change bottom-up.”
Joelle Rudolf and Nitya Gupta contributed reporting.
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