Cameron Spurr

Sofia Michaelides (’22) checks the electoral map to see the state of the presidential race. The map is usually filled once students get to school, but results have been filtering in all day long and will continue into the coming days.

If any student peered into classrooms today, they were more likely to see a U.S. election map than schoolwork on a number of students’ laptop screens. In a normal election year, when votes are counted at a faster pace, students and faculty head to school in the morning knowing who the next president will be.

However, in what will likely be remembered as the “pandemic election,” crucial votes are still being tabulated. Further, certain states are still outstanding, and vital results are yet to come tonight and through the rest of the week.

Living in the U.K., the states declared in the early hours of Nov. 4 were considered safe “building blocks” for either campaign, barring Florida and Texas. Though Democrats saw some hopeful openings early on, including Ohio, these were rapidly quashed once same-day voting, largely in favor of Trump, trickled in through the early morning hours. 

Periodically throughout last night, Maxine Wadsworth (’22) woke up to check on developments. She said she was wary of polling data that forecasted Democratic nominee Joe Biden as the favorite to win the election.

“I came into it thinking that Trump was gonna win,” she said. “I thought that there was so many people that weren’t proud of the fact that they were voting for Trump.”

Ultimately, the race has boiled down to the “blue wall” states that Trump flipped in 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Nevada and Georgia will also play an important role in the final stages. The advantage that Democratic nominee Joe Biden maintained in the blue wall states in the run-up to election day had seemingly vanished in the morning; Trump maintained a healthy lead in all three with roughly half of the vote counted.

As the election is still unfolding, Wadsworth said that election talk was common on campus throughout the day.

“Even within advisory, we were sitting there discussing it,” she said. “It’s truly at the center of everyone’s minds currently.”

According to NPR, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes will go to Joe Biden, with a difference of approximately 21,000 votes. Now, if Biden can manage to string together Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, he reaches the all-important 270 electoral votes.

In a survey conducted by The Standard in October, over 80% of High School students said they would vote for Biden. Hence, when the former vice president took the lead in Wisconsin and Michigan during the school day, the general mood in the High School changed noticeably from somber to cautiously optimistic.

As the race has tightened and results have slowed, Wadsworth said that patience is key, because a lot is still uncertain.

“At the end of the day, we don’t really know where it’s going to go, because they’re so close,” she said.