The Cornell Republicans faced backlash in 2016 after endorsing a third-party candidate and later endorsed Donald Trump in 2020. They are not endorsing a presidential candidate ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Nov. 3 seemed like a fairly normal day on Cornell’s campus: Against a backdrop of gray skies and chilly winds, Cornellians went to class, huddled up in cafes and grabbed food from campus dining halls. Around the country, however, the highly-anticipated, contentious 2020 presidential election unfolds. And most Cornellians have already made their voices heard through absentee or early voting.
In the race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, Cornell’s left-leaning campus favors the Democratic candidate, and many say they fear a Trump reelection. But as prelims accumulate and fall move-out draws closer, many are also preoccupied.
Fear and shock gripped Cornell’s campus when President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. In the days that followed, members of a stunned student body gathered in solidarity and held “cry-in” events responding to the surprise result.
Like many people, I tuned into the last presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle last week. The fragile masculinity of two American grandfathers and the way it manifested itself took up 90 minutes on every major news-media station and held the attention of myself and 63 million others on Thursday night. In a way, I think that we have been spoiled. I spent so much of the first debate pointing out disrespectful quips, laughing, internally crying and outwardly cursing our founding fathers for drafting a governmental system that could be completely decimated by “an unlikely candidate.” You know, as if ‘unlikely’ has recently become synonymous with racist, misogynist, xenophobic and ignorant. I have been seeing this new classification of the incumbent President Trump as “an underdog.” I had to refresh my definition of the word and found that it meant “a victim of injustice or persecution.” I feel obligated to express my displeasure that we classify the offender, our persecutor-in-chief, as “an underdog.”
Returning to the more tame and traditional Presidential debate that I tuned into on Thursday, I was bored.