The GW
HATCHET
November 4, 2024 Vol. 121 Iss. 12
AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER • SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904 • ONLINE AT GWHATCHET.COM
ELECTION GUIDE PHOTOS BY TOM RATH & DANIEL HEUER
PHOTO COLLAGE BY LEXI CRITCHETT
Students rally behind Harris for abortion rights, diverse perspective ALEXIA MASSOUD REPORTER
OLIVIA EARLEY REPORTER
Students who voted for Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris said they support her vow to protect reproductive rights, endorse economic policies focused on boosting the middle class and empower historically marginalized communities if elected as the country’s first woman of color president. More than 20 students said they’re excited to support a candidate fighting for bolstered economic support of small business owners and parents and the protection of reproductive rights in the wake of the repeal of national abortion protections and an election cycle in which abortion access is on the line in many states. Many of the students said they believe Harris, a Black and South Asian woman, will better represent their communities in office than past presidents because of her experiences combating misogynistic and racist remarks from her opponents that seek to delegitimize her career advancement. Junior Amina Robinson, the treasurer of the Black Student-Athlete Alliance from Detroit, Michigan, said
Harris can understand, advocate and design policy in ways that men cannot, resembling “a breath of fresh air.” She said Harris empathizes with the struggles Black women face in the United States, having faced remarks from political opponents like being called a “DEI hire.” “It makes me, personally, feel safer for my future, knowing that someone’s going to be advocating from the standpoint that I’ve always thought not everybody else understands,” Robinson said. Harris worked as a deputy district attorney in Oakland, California, and 2010, Harris was narrowly elected attorney general of California, the first woman and the first Black American to hold the title. Emily-Anne Santiago, the programming director for GW College Democrats from Georgia, said she believes Harris’ plan to provide a $6,000 child tax credit to parents of newborns would also open doors for women to join the workforce. She said the policy would allow women to focus on their job and not “strain themselves” as much when they come home. EJ Tennant, a senior from Tennessee and the co-president of Foggy Bottom Plan B, said Harris’ election would
help grant women better access to safe abortions. Harris has made abortion rights a core tenet of her campaign and has backed eliminating the filibuster to restore Roe v. Wade in the Senate after the Supreme Court overturned the federal abortion protections in June 2022. “A Trump presidency would put the work that D.C. community members do to provide reproductive health in grave danger, and I think a Trump federal abortion ban is still on the table,” Tennant said. First-year William O’Donnell, an international affairs student, said Harris’ middle-class background makes her more relatable than Trump, who is a businessman worth nearly $8 billion, and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who worked in the Silicon Valley tech industry. Senior Stephanie Animdee, the president of the Mu Beta Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and a member of Alianza — an Afro-Latinx student organization — compared Harris to the late Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to campaign for a presidential nomination for a major political party, because they are part of both the Black and Caribbean communities and sought powerful political positions.
Students back Trump for tough stance on immigration, economy ALEX GATES REPORTER
HENRY ROBINSON REPORTER
Students who cast their ballot for Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election said they laud his stances on immigration and economic policy but favored younger candidates in the party’s presidential primaries. Ten Republican students said they’re voting to reelect Trump due to his plans to curb inflation by cutting taxes and expanding tariffs and reduce illegal immigration by increasing security at the Mexican border. Half of the students said they initially supported Republican candidates for president, like former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, but rallied around Trump when the GOP declared him the party’s nominee in July. Sophomore Parker Malphrus, a contributing member of the GW College Republicans’ Political Affairs Committee from South Carolina, said he’s voting for Trump this election because he believes the former president will help the country return to a more stable economy after three
years of rising inflation. The U.S. inflation rate sat at 2.4 percent in September, the most recent available data, after settling from a peak of 9.1 percent in 2022. “It comes down to the economy and who’s best for my interest,” Malphrus said. Malphrus said in the primaries, he initially voted for Haley, who is 52, because he hoped the party would back a younger candidate than Trump, who is 78. Hailing from South Carolina, Malphrus said he appreciated Haley’s track record on election integrity and business, referencing how she signed a law as governor that required voters to present one of five forms of photo ID to vote, and brought jobs from large manufacturers like Boeing and BMW to the state. He said he nonetheless plans to support Trump because he received the Republican nomination. “It seems like Donald Trump is the best fitted to advance this American Dream for young people that I think is fading away,” Malphrus said. In the 2016 and 2020 presidential election cycles, Republican students were divided over the decision to elect Trump as president, with some claiming he had a “polarizing” effect on the part. Division among Re-
publican students in reelecting Trump in 2020 reflected a national trend marked by the emergence of antiTrump Republican groups. Junior Christina Carris, a student from Illinois and the public relations director of GWCRs, was the former president of Students for Haley at GW before Trump won the Republican primary. She said Haley’s rhetoric appeals to moderate and undecided voters more than Trump’s, which would have allowed her to court “soft Democrats.” “I do believe if she was the nominee, the Republicans wouldn’t be as worried as they are about this election,” Carris said. Carris said she disapproved of Trump’s delay in condemning the riots on Jan. 6, 2021 — when a crowd of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election certification — but still intends to support him in the upcoming election because she supports his “strict” border policies. Carris said drugs coming in from across the Mexican border exacerbates the U.S.’s fentanyl crisis. She added that Chicago, Illinois, her hometown, has one of the largest sex trafficking rings and claimed that “a lot of that” came from across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Students vote in battlegrounds deciding congressional power balance FAITH WARDWELL MANAGING EDITOR
RORY QUEALY NEWS EDITOR
As much of the community fixates on the historically narrow presidential race, some GW students are weighing in on contentious down-ballot elections that could determine control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. In an election cycle marked by fiery debates and polarizing ad buys, congressional control relies on seats in battleground states, like Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Arizona, which will shape the legislative agendas for the House and Senate for the next two years. More than a dozen students — many of them first-time voters — said these air-tight races catalyzed them to vote, but even as the students monitor competitive races through local media coverage and dispatches from family members at home, uncertainty remains on which major party will tip the scale on the Hill. Congress is currently split down the aisle, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats controlling the Senate, both with slim margins. But with 34 seats in the Senate and all 435 House seats up
for grabs this year, the parties have wrestled to flip the chambers in their favor. Junior Isabella Marias, a political science student from Scottsdale, Arizona, said the deadlocked local House race for Arizona’s 1st congressional district — one of 22 tossup House races — pushed her to the polls. She hopes voters unseat seven-term incumbent Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) and elect Democratic physician Amish Shah, a former member of the Arizona State House of Representatives, who she campaigned for in the primaries. “It’s a completely unpredictable election,” Marias said. As a resident of a border state, she said immigration policies are particularly salient to her when voting and that she opposes Schweikert’s stances that she said “treat immigrants as subpar to Americans.” Schweikert opposes illegal immigration and giving amnesty to undocumented immigrants and has supported former President Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall since 2016. Shah has worked to strengthen border security through a bipartisan approach by increasing funding for the border by more than $200 million in Arizona’s state legislature, but Republicans say he hasn’t gone far enough after he voted against a package of budget
legislation that included border security funding. Marias added that she values Shah’s record of defending reproductive rights because she doesn’t want to send a representative to Congress who would vote to restrict a woman’s right to make abortion choices in Arizona. Schweikert has sponsored a “Life at Conception Act” six times that would have made abortion nationwide almost completely illegal and voted against protecting access to contraceptives. “Schweikert has been in office for around 20 years now, I want to say, so that would be a huge deal if the Democrat were finally going to win,” Marias said. Marias said friends at GW have told her that her vote matters “a lot more” than theirs because she lives in an area with tight House, Senate and presidency races. She said she sent in her mail-in ballot on Oct. 21 but is anxious about the possibility of her ballot not being received, which would help candidates she opposes, like Schweikert, win. “There’s no doubt in my mind that it’ll be a very close race,” Marias said. “The fear is definitely like my vote isn’t counted, and it’s that close.” Junior Brandon McNamara, a political science and entrepreneurship student from Austin, Texas,
A blank absentee ballot
said he was close to abstaining from voting this election year because he didn’t feel represented by either major party’s presidential candidate. But he said the highly contentious race for the Texas Senate seat, where he felt a stronger pull to support Democratic candidate Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), pushed him to cast his ballot. He said he sided with Allred because of his stances on issues, like immigration, where he feels Allred has taken a more bipartisan stance in establishing border security, like
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL HEUER
pushing for the Bipartisan Senate Border Bill, and on abortion, where Allred has committed to protecting reproductive rights in Congress amid the state’s abortion ban. “I should vote at least for the candidates I agree with strongly or feel strongly towards, like Allred,” McNamara said. “I felt much stronger about voting in the Senate race than in the presidential where I felt that there was a clearer choice in candidate.” See ELECTIONS Page 7