Juliana Li (12): I’ve been following it pretty closely. I’ve mostly been getting news from social media about the presidential election, but I’m also really interested in the congressional election coming up in November, because I’m interning for one of the candidates.

Ameera Ramzan (10): I check the news pretty much every day. I’m just looking for headline updates. So I’d say pretty closely, but I check it around the same time each day, so I guess if something happens in the morning and it’s not super alarming, I won’t know about it until the evening.

Mark Janda, history department chair: Not as closely as some of my peers, but apparently from what I hear, more closely than most people. I knew who Tim Walz was before he was selected as Vice President, and lots of people had never heard of him. I feel like there’s a lot more that I could be doing to pay more attention more closely, but I suppose I’m probably better informed than the norm.

Ameera: In terms of policy issues, abortion and reproductive rights, there are very opposing views on both sides, so they’re definitely using that on both sides to contrast the other side. I’ve been looking to that. And then just in terms of global conflicts, there’s also different opinions on that from both sides that I’m looking at. Human rights, climate change, those are mostly the issues I care about, and those are the ones that are being very, very polarized on both sides. They’re being argued a lot because they are where the candidates have the most differences.

Eric Dong (11): I think something that’s pretty prominent, especially with changing society values, is abortion. I don’t think the Republican Party is that keen on abortion rights. If you look at some of the things the Heritage Foundation says, their take on abortion isn’t great, or at least in my opinion. They want to put greater restrictions on it and things like that, which I don’t think would be necessarily beneficial.

Janda: I’m going to be really curious to see what ends up being said about two big foreign policy issues, of course, Ukraine and Gaza. It’ll be interesting to see what is said there. I would love to see how the various candidates can address issues like inflation and wealth stratification and health care. I think those are, those are the big things that come to mind.

Lauren Xi (10): I feel like in an ideal situation, we wouldn’t even have a two party system. I feel like that’s inherently unfair because two parties can’t cover – America’s a country of millions and there’s a lot of huge class differences, and just two parties is not going to be able to cover all of that, because what if someone’s economically conservative, but socially liberal and vice versa? Like it doesn’t make sense to only have two parties. 

Juliana: I’m looking for someone who stands up for my communities, for example, women, as I mentioned earlier, and youth. I’m looking for someone who genuinely cares about the issues that they’re fighting for, and someone who cares about the people around them and puts the general American public first.

Eric: I just think that the President should really try to cooperate and really should try to not play into this rhetoric of them versus us. I think both candidates, Harris and Trump, both of them play into this rhetoric of, the other person is not good, which I really don’t think is something that our President should have. People are people. It’s not like they’re inherently evil or they’re inherently trying to stop you, right?