In the weeks since the 2024 presidential election, various groups at Dartmouth have hosted events to discuss former President Donald Trump’s victory — from a panel with government professors to a Conservative Students of Dartmouth ‘Election Debrief’ and election-related listening circles at the Tucker Center.
Some events helped students process the results, while others sought to explain why Trump won. According to Rockefeller Center for Public Policy assistant director for public programs and special events Dvora Greenberg Koelling, the Center’s events made some students feel “less scared.”
“We’ve heard from a lot of students that the conversations have really helped them understand the election a little better,” she said. “Some people have said it’s made them less scared. Some people have said that it’s made them more intrigued, or want to ask more questions.”
On Nov. 7, the Rockefeller Center hosted journalist and Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, who gave a lecture titled “The Strange Death of Neoliberal America.”
Yglesias said Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic policy was “sloppy” and “unprincipled.” He claimed that Democrats had difficulty abandoning their social and cultural commitments, which alienated blue-collar voters.
“Non-college people, increasingly of all races, just don’t agree with progressive cultural politics,” he said.
The Conservative Students of Dartmouth hosted an event titled “Election Debrief” on Nov. 12. Attendees shared a variety of perspectives on the results, with some supportive of Trump and others more ambivalent. Some who supported Trump said they voted for him because of his persona rather than his policies, with some criticizing Trump’s plan to levy general tariffs. Others denounced his character but liked his stances on immigration and believed he would help the economy better than a Harris administration.
“I would not say there is a unified conservative reaction,” Dartmouth Conservatives president Alexander Azar III ’25 said in an interview after the event. “I would say those conservatives who are Republicans, I presume, are happy with the results.”
In “What Just Happened,” held on Nov. 8, a panel of four Dartmouth government professors attempted to explain why Trump won the election. Government professor and panelist Brendan Nyhan said it was difficult to verify one explanation.
“What we saw is what political scientists call a uniform swing, so basically a kind of relatively parallel movement in the vote margin towards Trump, relative to what we saw in 2020,” he said. “That makes it hard to tell any particular story about why some group or some information source or some campaign factor drove the result.”
Dartmouth Political Union president Mac Mahoney ’26 said that these kinds of events are important, but emphasized that it is important for Dartmouth to remain neutral in its post-election event programming.
“I do think the institution has a responsibility to be neutral, and allow for the wide variety of students who have different viewpoints to feel comfortable here,” he said. “I think my professors generally have done a really good job of handling it [the election] in a way that’s making sure that all their students — regardless if they were happy [with the results] — felt comfortable in the classroom.”
However, some students took issue with the scope of campus discussions. Several participants at the Conservative Students of Dartmouth event speculated that College organizations may not have hosted the same number of support events if the election had gone in Harris’s favor.
The College hosted a series of “listening circles” for Democrats, Republicans and students who are “all parties” or “none,” scheduled for the days after the election, according to a campus-wide email sent by the Tucker Center. The invitation was sent out on the day of the election — before it was called for Trump.
Dartmouth Democrats policy director Leo Stritikus ’27 said people should feel comfortable on campus regardless of their political beliefs. Still, support resources were important for some students, he said.
“There are people who have valid concerns about what a potential Trump presidency would look like,” he said. “There are students who are worried about their immigration status, who have every right to be here. There are people who are worried about not having autonomy over their bodies or people who are worried about not being able to marry who they want to marry.”
