Saturday night was a time to celebrate for Adam Hawkins and he went out and bought a bottle of champagne to mark the occasion, knowing Joe Biden has been declared the U.S. president-elect after defeating Donald Trump.
Four days after the first votes were being counted, Biden locked up Pennsylvania and the 20 electoral district votes he needed to secure his majority of 270 votes and Hawkins could finally relax, knowing the vote he emailed home to his Seattle home in King County helped make a difference.
“It’s been an interesting four years, that’s for sure,” said Hawkins.
The 27-year-old UNBC glacial geology doctoral student was waiting to hear Biden’s speech Saturday afternoon before jumping on board a Zoom call with his family back home. He considers himself lucky to have spent the past five years – the duration of Trump’s four-year presidency – living in Prince George.
“Coming from a family with a lot of strong women, the guy that Trump was, he represented a certain stepping backward and not exactly a step forward for the country,” said Hawkins. “Seeing him not re-elected gives some hope that the country is more open and ethics aren’t completely screwed up and we can work towards progress instead of going back to the 50s and 60s.
“It’s pretty remarkable and certainly historic to see the first female and first person of colour to be the vice-president elect for the U.S. Some of the House and Senate seats we have some of the first (trans-gender) people and an increase in the number of First Nations representatives in the House. It’s great to see that increase in diversity.”
The close race that took pollsters by surprise and delayed the outcome of the vote has been partially attributed to Biden’s apparent willingness to bring a more socialistic approach to governing the country. He promised in his speech on Saturday to try to heal the country and bring the two sides together and Hawkins thinks he has that conciliatory ability.
“One of Biden’s strengths is that he’s able to take some of these progressive ideals and far-left ideas that initially half the country thinks is radical and he makes them sound like common sense,” said Hawkins. “If he’s able to do that well, maybe some of those things can actually move forward.
“Some of these social issues that should transcend politics more than it seems to have the last little while, hopefully that’s something Biden’s able to do, to allow us to actually tackle issues as a country that just aren’t partisan. It’s stuff we have to deal with. You can’t partisan your way out of pandemic, you have to take some real action together. You can’t partisan your way out of climate change, it takes everyone working together to deal with that. The last four years, as an American climate scientist, have been a little rough.”
Voter turnout of more than 145 million was an all-time high for a U.S. federal election. Hawkins said his home state is used to voting by mail and it was no trouble for him to print off his ballot, sign it and scan it for electronic registration.
“Mail-in ballots have been pretty standard for Washington state but some of the states that aren’t used to it, they had to make some adjustments to it this year,” he said.
“It didn’t seem like everyone was working together trying to increase voter turnout but in the end we were able to get folks out. It’s pretty cool to see how many people have voted, for Trump or Biden, in the middle of a pandemic. It’s cool to see this many people engaged in politics.”
Chris Morgan, a natural resources and environmental studies masters student at UNBC is from Wisconsin, one of the last states to fall to Biden, after initially going Republican red in the preliminary vote count. He learned the results of the vote Saturday morning listening to CBC radio while making breakfast.
“It was mostly a sense of relief, especially at first,” said Morgan, 27, who voted for Biden by mail. “The result has been trending that way the last few days but it was good to get that official projection. Everybody that I know (in Madison) was pulling for a Biden victory, so they’re pretty happy about that.
“They have a right-leaning supreme court in Wisconsin and there had been a lot of legal challenges right up until the absentee ballots being sent out. I knew there were a lot of votes to be counted in Milwaukee, the largest city, which probably has the largest population of black folks in the state. Similar to some of those other swing states, it was counting those ballots in Milwaukee, Detroit and Atlanta that really swung it as those votes were counted. I figured Wisconsin would go blue but I wasn’t confident in that.”
Biden has 290 electoral college votes to Trump’s 214 and that gap could increase by 16 if Biden hangs on to his lead on Georgia. Morgan said he was blindsided by how close the vote actually was.
“We expected a serious rebuke of Trump and right wing nationalism and the fact it was so close, even with the victory, is bit disheartening,” Morgan said. “I’m still fixated on if the Senate is going to flip and we’re going to have to wait a couple months to find that out. It’s still a disappointment that very close to half the country, despite all we’ve been through the past four years, still support this man.
“He clearly wasn’t a president for the entire country, just a lack of civility and compassion. Trump was loyal to his supporters, for the most part, and didn’t necessarily care about anybody else. At the very least, Biden will be a sense of calm, but if we’re able to flip the senate blue as well there’s a lot more good he can do.”
Trump has so far refused to concede the election. He’s filed lawsuits to try to stop vote counting in states where he trails Biden and has vowed he won’t leave the White House peacefully.
“He hasn’t followed traditions and it’s disappointing but I do still have faith in the rest of the institutions in our country that he will end up being removed eventually,” Morgan said. “I’m not surprised he’s not going willingly, though. I don’t think he has much to stand on with those accusations and he’s desperate to cling to power because he probably will be tried for crimes once he leaves office.
“His taxes is one of them. I know he’s got $400 million in debt that’s coming due soon. With some of the investigations he’s been looked into in terms of Russian meddling and stuff like that, I think that might be delved into some more once he’s no longer the head of state.”
