On Wednesday, Feb. 28, Mount Holyoke students and community members gathered in Hooker Auditorium to attend a McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives panel. The event, titled “Democracy’s Global Test: Reflections on the Year of Elections,” aimed to explore threats to democracy, important elections and their international impact in the “biggest election year in history.”
On Wednesday, Jan. 20, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were officially sworn in as the 46th president and vice president of the United States, respectively. With the COVID-19 pandemic now having claimed over 400,000 American lives and still surging across the country, the inauguration itself looked different. Everyone in attendance wore face masks, and the people in front of the Capitol sat physically distanced from each other. Supreme Court justices, members of Congress and other government officials, as well as past presidents, were seen in attendance. The number of tickets for each person to hand out, as well as receive, was limited to keep the size of the crowd down. The National Mall, where people can usually stand to watch the event, was instead decorated with American flags.
By Soleil Doering ’24 & Rehat Thussu ’23
Staff Writers
The U.S. presidential transition between President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden may have lasting political implications. Biden’s victory and Trump’s refusal to concede has led to an especially volatile transfer of power. Election results have been contested before, such as in the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, but according to Assistant Professor of Politics Adam Hilton, the 2020 election brings new sentiments.
On Saturday, Nov. 7, media reports called the 2020 presidential race for former Vice President Joe Biden after he won the electoral votes from Pennsylvania, pushing him over the 270 electoral vote mark needed to win. The outcome of the election took four days to be determined. Although mail-in ballots are still being counted in Pennsylvania and a number of other states, there were so many votes for Biden that it would not matter if the rest of the votes were for President Donald Trump. As of Nov. 11, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona were still counting their mail-in ballots, with North Carolina leaning toward Trump and Georgia and Arizona leaning toward Biden.
“I am really looking forward to the possibility of finally exhaling for the first time in four years,” said Adam Hilton, professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College.
“This is certainly the highest-stakes election of my lifetime, and I think it might be one of the highest stake elections in American history,” he continued. “I will be very relieved to see Trump gone because I think he is a threat to American democracy.”
With issues such as COVID-19, equal human rights, voter suppression and intimidation at play, as well as actions taken by Republican politicians to undermine nationwide confidence in mail-in ballots, the 2020 presidential election has been a political race full of controversy. Due to the drastic divide between supporters of President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, this election is said to be one of the most important in American history. Lynn Morgan, a history professor at Mount Holyoke, compared the 2020 presidential election to that of 1860, which resulted in the secession of the South from the rest of the U.S.
