ADDISON COUNTY — Middlebury College students Daniza Tazabekova and Laura McDow said they saw a lot of enthusiasm among college students about this year’s election.

“Excitement about voting and participation in democracy was far higher this semester than previous years, according to both my lived experience since 2022 and our organization advisor’s experiences from the last two decades,” said Tazabekova, president of MiddVotes, a nonpartisan student organization that works to increase civic engagement.

“Though it is standard practice for voters to be less engaged during midterm elections, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections did not see similar turnout from the college.”

Tazabekova pointed to a few examples of that engagement, such as professors and staff recognizing MiddVotes efforts and first-year students frequently checking in on a residence hall pledge challenge.

“I would go as far as to say that Middlebury now has a strong culture of voting. Students not only see it as a privilege, but treat it as a responsibility,” Tazabekova said.

Tazabekova was a speaker at a community conversation hosted at Town Hall Theater on Tuesday, where over 50 people gathered to discuss the results of the elections and next steps.

The “Good Talks: Election Reflection” event was sponsored by Middlebury College’s Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation and is the latest in a series of such events, which feature a brief overview on a topic from an expert and structured conversations in small groups led by a facilitator.

Tazabekova was one of three panelists who started things off with remarks on Tuesday, along with State Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Middlebury, and Middlebury College political science professor Bert Johnson.

“I first want to acknowledge some of the emotions that have come with this election and with the results of the election,” Sen. Hardy said. “I know lots of people are feeling sadness, and some people are feeling elation and excitement … Right now, I’m feeling determined and grateful, and I just want to make sure that everybody feels OK and safe to feel whatever they’re feeling about the election and about the results and about what happened before and after last Tuesday.”

Tazabekova described the experience at the college.

“The last week has been filled with a lot of energy and emotion, but for me the long haul really started the moment I got back to campus (in late August),” she recalled. “We did voter registration drives almost every week, in the last month twice a week. We helped over 200 students send absentee ballots back home, a lot of them from the New England area but a couple from Arkansas, Texas, Michigan, Missouri, California.”

Tazabekova acknowledged that election excitement on campus can’t all be a direct result of MiddVotes’ civic engagement efforts, as this election is generally viewed as one of the most consequential elections in American history.

“However, it is reasonable to say that we have substantially helped generate excitement and education surrounding absentee voting,” she added.

COLLEGE TURNOUT

Tazabekova told the Independent that MiddVotes has traditionally held voter registration drives and offered absentee voting assistance.

“However, one of my goals when I became president of MiddVotes was to expand MiddVotes’s reach to community building more generally,” she said. “As such, we have hosted community watch parties for students to watch the presidential and vice presidential debates in the Student Center together.”

Those events were moderated by Johnson and political science professor Matthew Dickinson. Tazabekova noted that over 300 students in total attended those watch parties, and more than 350 students gathered on Election Night to watch results come in.

This fall MiddVotes also hosted a panel with Middlebury College community members who served as delegates at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and worked to strengthen its ties with various cultural organizations on campus to engage historically disenfranchised groups in local and state politics.

McDow, the communications director for MiddVotes, noted that the organization also works to connect with first-year students and provide them with resources to vote while at college.

“This year we held voter registration drives during the first-year orientation activities and registered around 100 new students in both Vermont and their home states,” McDow said.

MiddVotes also organized its second First-year Pledge to Vote Residence Hall Challenge, which asks freshmen to pledge to vote if they are able or commit to other civic engagement activities if not. The residence hall with the most pledges wins a bonfire and doughnuts, McDow said.

“We have found that specifically engaging with the freshman class creates a new wave of civically engaged and excited voters who want to share that with their peers,” she said.

McDow saw results.

“I was absolutely blown away by the commitment, engagement, and enthusiasm that I saw in the weeks leading up to the election.”

Students’ enthusiasm was reflected in the number of students who took part in MiddVotes offerings this fall. Tazabekova said the organization registered at least 200 students to vote leading up to the election and around 90 college students took advantage of a shuttle service providing rides to the polls on Election Day.

“We heard reports that the Middlebury Rec Center polling station got a record amount of students registered to vote on the same day,” Tazabekova said. “A huge block of it voted one way, and a huge block of it voted another way, and to me that was equally empowering because it means that students are getting their voices heard despite being in what could be seen as a bubble of Middlebury.”

Middlebury Town Clerk Karin Mott confirmed that the polling station saw a substantial amount of same-day voter registration on Election Day, anecdotally in the hundreds, but could not say how many of those voters were Middlebury College students. She noted that it’s common to see a lot of same-day registration during presidential election years.

Following Election Day, a variety of different events were held on campus to help students reflect on the election and build community. Tazabekova said she’s been in conversation with college officials about post-election events.

“We hope to engage a wide variety of student organizations to address both the emotional and educational implications of the election results, and MiddVotes will play a critical role in these events,” she said. “We want to give community members (faculty, staff and students alike) space to relieve stress and connect with others emotionally, and learn the potential political, social and economic consequences of a second Trump presidency.”

OTHER TAKEAWAYS

Attendees on Tuesday also heard from Johnson, who offered insight on the election results on the national level from a political scientist’s perspective.

“This election, for all the momentous potential impact that it may have, was not far and beyond what we might have expected given the economic context,” he said. “This was about a 49%-51% election; that is about what economic indicators would have prepared us to expect.”

Johnson provided context on some of the voter trends seen in this year’s election.

“There were some demographic shifts that were in many ways continuations of what we’ve seen before, particularly among Hispanic voters moving farther to the right, people in rural areas moving a little farther to the right, working class people moving a little farther to the right, but these are all continuations of trends that existed beforehand,” he said.

Johnson also offered attendees an idea of what to look for in the months to come, based on what’s occurred during previous presidencies.

“Typically, a new president who is newly elected gets a lot done in the early months of the term and gets very ambitious, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm, particularly if we have a unified government as we expect to have,” he said. “Then the immediate agenda may peter out, ambitions may get beyond what voters are willing to accept, and there may be a diminishment in enthusiasm among the majority party and a backlash among the minority party, and then the midterm election comes around and that tends to reverberate against the party in power.”

IN ADDISON COUNTY

Hardy spoke with the crowd about how the election played out in Addison County and Vermont, noting that prior to Election Day Democratic lawmakers held a supermajority in both the Vermont House and state Senate.

“After last week, the Democrats had pretty big losses,” she said. “We lost our supermajority in the House and the Senate. We lost six senate seats in the majority.”

Hardy noted that Democrats also lost 18 seats in the Vermont House. In Addison County, GOP candidates unseated two longtime Democratic lawmakers — incumbent state Sen. Chris Bray and Rep. Diane Lanpher of Vergennes.

“After being a completely blue county for the last two years, having a completely blue delegation, we now have a decidedly purple delegation with a mix of Democrats and Republicans,” Hardy said. “I think that says a lot about what’s happening nationwide and a microcosm of what’s happening in our state and in our county.”

Following the election, Hardy said she feels fortunate and grateful to have been re-elected (she was the top vote-getter in her race).

“I’ve been thinking a lot about processing what’s going on; what did I learn and what do I need to focus on, but I’ve also been thinking about how I work with new colleagues,” she said. “I think a lot of that is the conversation that maybe we’ll have tonight; how do we talk with and work with people who have a difference of opinion from us.”