On Tuesday night, thousands of NYU students anxiously crowded computer screens to watch states turn hues of red and blue as results from the 2024 presidential election rolled in. As the late night turned into early morning, news of former President Donald Trump’s reelection elicited confusion, fear and disbelief that has rattled the campus community.
“When I woke up, I could see from my roommate’s face that we lost — I had no words,” Tisch first-year Lemo Sekiguchi told WSN. “I was just like, ‘Our country’s fucked.’”
In a series of interviews with WSN, students said it had been challenging to return to their regular schedule immediately after the election. CAS junior Eleni Delacruz said she awoke in a haze Wednesday morning and that she had a quiz that day, but struggled to focus on anything other than the election’s results. She added that campus felt bleak, as though moods were universally low among students and faculty.
“It was so dead everywhere,” Delacruz said. “No one could really think straight, including myself. I can’t believe it’s real.”
Trump won the presidential race with a decisive victory, receiving 295 electoral votes and sweeping all seven swing states. Called by The Associated Press at 5:35 a.m. on Wednesday — earlier than many had expected — the win was accompanied by a Republican-controlled Senate, with the House of Representatives on track to follow suit.
The day after the election, NYU student activists were joined in Brooklyn by a group of around 30 demonstrators from universities across the city to protest the election’s outcome and urge their peers to continue organizing against Trump’s administration. The group — led by NYU’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society — marched to the Tandon School of Engineering from Cadman Plaza Park, with a dozen police officers and three protest marshals following them until they arrived.
At the protest, speakers criticized Trump’s political agenda, including his anti-immigrant rhetoric and continued support for Israel amid the war in Gaza. Although the group focused on Trump’s administration, protesters also expressed opposition to Vice President Kamala Harris regarding her and the Biden administration’s position on the war. Tandon junior Eb — an NYU SDS member who requested partial anonymity due to safety concerns — said that regardless of who had won Tuesday night, the group’s organizing efforts against U.S. military support in Israel would have remained the same.
At NYU’s Washington Square campus, students echoed similar sentiments. CAS senior Luis Juarez Rodriguez said he has undocumented relatives who had the same fears of deportation under Democratic administrations that they did under Republican ones.
“Democrats are not going to save us,” Rodriguez said. “Republicans are definitely not going to save us. People are going to save us, communities are going to save us. I am hopeful — and I will remain hopeful — that will remain true.”
Kat Thompson, a senior at the College of Arts & Science, said she felt let down by members of Latino communities who voted for Trump and “abandoned” themselves as well as Black communities in the country. Thompson said that while Harris’s campaign “isolated Democrats” and excluded the working class and other marginalized groups that would have otherwise supported her, her loss came down to voters’ bigotry.
“I can sit here and point blame all day, but the fact that matters is that the Black community has every right to feel isolated and upset, and the Latino community really needs to get checked on where their values lie,” Thompson said. “We can take this anger and sit there and wallow in it, or we can organize and regroup and move forward.”
NYU has held multiple post-election events to support students processing the outcome, including a community space for students of color, an online Wagner discussion about the new administration’s implications on public policy and an upcoming panel featuring political pollsters and journalists.
“You know how they say history goes back and forth, and it’s like progress?” Tisch first-year Yezy Suh said. “Right now, where’s the progress?”
Rory Lustberg contributed reporting.
Contact Mariapaula Gonzalez at [email protected].
