Students watch as Obama re-elected

After months of poll-watching and campaigning, hundreds of students gathered on Low Steps Tuesday night to follow the election returns and, ultimately, celebrate the re-election of President Barack Obama, CC '83.

The crowd peaked at about 300 people, all of them watching CNN's election coverage projected on a large screen opposite Low Library. Meanwhile, the Columbia University College Republicans watched the results come in at Mel's Burger Bar, and the Columbia University Democrats checked their smartphones as they returned from a campaign trip to Ohio.

"The entire ride back we'd been checking exit polls, and when the New York Times said it [that Obama would win], everyone freaked out," Evelyn Jagoda, CC '14 and CU Dems vice president, said. "We erupted in shouts of, 'Four more years,' and, 'Yes we did.' It was incredible."

At Low Steps, where the crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Obama, students cheered loudly when CNN projected Obama's Electoral College victory. Many students ran out of their dorms in celebration.

Students cited a wide variety of reasons for supporting Obama, ranging from his economic policies to his support for women's rights. Several said that they wanted him to win despite what they considered a flawed first term, with Ben Rimland, CC '15, saying that he was "happy we didn't run ourselves off a cliff, but not generally filled with hope and change and optimism."

"I feel like it was the lesser of two evils, but I feel like we made the right call tonight," Rimland said. "For me, it was economic issues-taxes, having a plan that made sense. I felt that he could actually explain his economic plan and had the math to back it up."

"I don't think four years is enough to do what he needed to do, because he just inherited such a terrible economic condition, and he just had a lot that he needed to work on, and four years wasn't enough," said Akunne Robyn Daniels, CC '15. "And I think that now that he doesn't have to worry about re-election, I hope that it'll be better."

Raeye Daniel, CC '13, agreed, saying she hopes Obama does more in his second term.

"I definitely feel like second-term presidents in general in the U.S. tend to work better, because of the fact that they don't have to worry about re-election," Daniel said. "They tend to follow more of what they set out to do originally. I think that Obama will go back to, hopefully, his original platforms from 2008."

Some students were surprised that the race was called so early, especially considering Obama's narrow leads in key battleground states like Ohio, Florida, and Virginia when CNN projected his victory at about 11:20 p.m.

Julian Bass-Krueger, CC '15, who canvassed for Obama in 2008, said he was surprised that the networks called Ohio when the numbers indicated it was still neck and neck.

"Friends I was with were still holding out reservations, because of when Gore got projected as the winner of the 2000 election and then turned out not to win," Bass-Krueger said. "So I mean, there are always a couple reservations to celebrating too early, but I think by now, it's pretty much clear that Obama has won. So I'm just waiting for it to settle in."

While many Obama supporters gathered on Low Steps, several members of the Columbia University College Republicans watched CNN's elections coverage on a screen at Mel's Burger Bar, at 111th Street and Broadway. The group sat quietly toward the back of the bar, which also had several tables of cheering Obama supporters.

John Kenney, CC '13 and CUCR's director of public relations, said that most of the group's members "were resigned pretty early to the fact that President Obama would be re-elected."

"The demographics of the country have changed in a way such that the Electoral College currently favors the Democratic Party," Kenney said. "And so, short of a major gaffe or national disaster, it was unlikely that Obama would lose."

Tom Callander, SEAS '14 and CUCR's director of finance, said after the election was called that he hopes that Obama works with congressional Republicans to avoid sequestration, a series of across-the-board budget cuts that are set to take affect Jan. 2. Still, cooperation goes both ways-David Bowles, CC '13 and CUCR's director of intergroup affairs, said that Obama's re-election would send a signal to the Republican Party that they need to cooperate with Democrats over the next four years.

"It will let the Republicans know that instead of trying to block Barack Obama, they need to work with him," Bowles said. "They need to come to the table and be able to compromise."

Obama's victory in Ohio was aided by the approximately 170 students who took part in the CU Dems trip to Ohio, where they knocked on more than 56,000 doors over four days. Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, CC '15 and CU Dems lead activist, gave a speech on one of the group's three buses back to New York, saying that "every single knock was a knock toward victory, and it could not have happened without us."

"The margins of victory look like they will be smaller than the number of doors that we knocked on, meaning that we had an impact greater than the margin of victory," Jagoda said.

Jackie Garcia, BC '12, was one of several Columbia and Barnard graduates who returned to campus Tuesday night to watch the results and get out the vote. Garcia remembered seeing Obama and Arizona Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate in 2008, speak at a forum in Roone Arledge Auditorium during her freshman year.

"Columbia is where Obama graduated from, and it's where he started his political activism, his grassroots. And it's also where we started voting, and we continued on-and this is why we came back," Garcia said. "It's very special to us."

Avantika Kumar and Alessandra Poblador contributed reporting.