Rithvik Narayan was convinced he had a good argument in favour of a Donald Trump win. “No one knew of him sometime back. There has to be something about him if he can emerge out of nowhere,” he said. His friend Sumanth Balaji won that argument by deadpanning: “This is not sports day, da.”
Rithvik and Sumanth, of PSBB Nungambakkam and P.S. Senior Secondary School, Mylapore, were among students from schools and colleges across the city who crammed into the Mowbray’s Hall of the Hotel Crowne Plaza for the Presidential Election Day event, organised by the U.S. Consulate General on Wednesday.
The event, scheduled from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., had to wrap up at noon with no news outlet calling the election even though Trump held the edge, with 244 electoral college votes. Actor Nassar’s presence and Bhargav Ramakrishnan’s stand-up act kept the audience engaged, but there was no shortage of entertainment because of the surprise unleashed by Trump.
Even as the large screen in the hall playing CNN projected a narrow win for Trump, the group of six Class 11 students this newspaper interacted with had their minds made up. Even as they observed that “Hillary has the best policies” and that “Trump is a little unstable,” they favoured the latter.
Rooting for Bernie
As it turns out, almost all students had begun the U.S. election season rooting for Bernie Sanders. But moved over to Trump when Sanders failed to secure the Democratic nomination.
“I am merely a spectator,” began Gautam Singaraju of Mylapore’s Vidya Mandir, who said he supported Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson. Next to him, Vishal S. of PSBB, Nungambakkam, chortled: an avid watcher of John Oliver’s weekly show Last Week Tonight, he had come to support Green Party’s Jill Stein. Gautam explained that he preferred Trump over Clinton, but was happy with neither: “Devil and the deep sea,” he said, adding “Clinton is part of the establishment. Trump is his own man.”
Real voters
E. Thomas Mathew, who retired as a Senior Vice President of Wells Fargo, said that he had voted at Virginia via absentee ballot. Mathew is a registerd Republican, but when asked why he voted for Trump, he chuckled saying, “But I didn’t say I voted Trump.”
Harrison Wagener, an exchange student at MCC, missed his vote because of a delay built into California’s voting system. “I thought they would email a PDF of my ballot, but turns out, they use (snail) mail. I had to return it by post, too. It had to be done in a week and there was no time left,” he said. Wagener is an Independent, but would have voted for Clinton. Krithika Ganesan too, would have voted Clinton, but missed the opportunity — her first chance to vote in the US — due to the same delays. “I feel guilty now,” said the student of SRM University, who is a naturalised citizen.
In comments delivered ahead of Trump being declared the winner, Consul General Phillip A. Min said that regardless of who wins the election, the India-U.S. ties will grow stronger. “We are on an upward trajectory. Under Modi and Obama, our relationship soared. We have 100 different initiatives, we have over 40 different working groups covering diverse issues...,” he said.
At the end of the event, the organisers realised that they had not announced the results of a mock election, where audience were given the choice of voting for candidates on the Clinton or Trump ticket on a computer placed in a booth. Even as CNN showed her hanging by a thread, the tally showed Clinton-Tim Kaine had won 280-57 against Trump-Mike Pence, with one invalid vote polled.
