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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

Hoosiers respond to Trump's election

caRally

Students and professors Across campus Wednesday responded to Donald Trump’s election as president.

Jeff Park said he was surprised when Trump took leads in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the polls had made him expect otherwise. He’d been worried when the stocks started to drop. Now, the junior from South Korea contemplated his future.

“As an international student, to be honest, I wasn’t really thinking of working in the U.S.,” Park, 23, said. “And Trump is now president, so I’m thinking I should go back to my country.”

Although the polls were wrong, sociology professor Chris Von Der Haar said she wasn’t surprised. A former manager of surveys for the CBS and New York Times poll, she’d seen a tight race coming. The presences of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein complicated predictions. The models were simply wrong — they’d failed the public, she said.

“I had students in for review sessions this morning, and they were devastated,” she said.

For other students, too, the results came as a surprise. Eleni Salyers, 22, and her friends — fellow Democrats — had watched together in disbelief as Trump took and maintained a lead She stayed up to watch results but eventually turned in around 1:30 a.m., she said. She was tired. She’d gotten up early to vote for Clinton.

Salyers thinks her vote mattered, she said, “but the state of Indiana is so Republican, there wasn’t a chance in Indiana.”

Hunter McKenzie, a 25-year-old graduate student in second language studies, said he too was still in shock. He punctuated his sentences with nervous laughter.

He thought about the election as a referendum on multiculturalism, one that ended with the people electing a man openly backed by the Ku Klux Klan. He thought about the wave of nationalist movements gaining popularity, not just here but across the globe.

He thought about his Mexican-American family in California and especially his 3-year-old cousin, Cruz, who’d grow up under a president “who has legitimized using derisive language to minorities.”

Later, he’d teach his T135: Introduction to the American Experience for International Students discussion section, and he thought about what he’d say to his students from China, Malaysia and Taiwan if and when they asked questions. What would he tell them about a head of state who, as McKenzie interpreted, didn’t want some of them here?

He’d spent the day trying to figure out what planet he’d woken up on, he said.

“It has happened here,” he said as a final thought.

“It” being what?

“What they said couldn’t happen here.”

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