Students held campaign signs and ferried to and from the polls at Hanover High School during the day Tuesday, but by 8 p.m., a lull had swept the campus. Instead of huddling around televisions in the Collis Center, Thayer Dining Hall lobby or dorm common rooms, most students seemed to go about their routine nighttime business and paid little heed to the election's outcome.
A multitude of mass BlitzMail messages sent to students in the days prior to the election advertised a Rockefeller Center primary night party to be hosted by Rockefeller Center director Linda Fowler. The messages encouraged students to stop by, eat and discuss the results as cable news channels reported them. But there were fewer students than cans of soda in the Rockefeller Center, and the majority of those students were ones who had worked closely on candidates' campaigns.
The student activists huddled around the food table, positioned in the hallway outside the three classrooms broadcasting campaign news and laid out with soda, pretzels and chips.
"I guess I have to go to Food Court now," Ingrid Nelson '05 said. "I was expecting them to have actual food here so I skipped dinner!"
Rockefeller Center Director Linda Fowler arrived around 8:40 p.m., chatting with some students for a few minutes before leaving, presumably to answer a profusion of phone calls from national news outlets seeking her perspective on the results.
Once the activists had briefly exchanged greetings with Fowler,.one grumbled to the others, "Can we leave now?" By 9 p.m., almost everyone had departed, leaving a few bunches of festive red, white and blue balloons, some stray pretzels and peanuts and three lecture halls that continued airing CNN to hundreds of empty seats.
Meanwhile, on the other side of campus, Collis and Thayer were equally deserted. Students wandering around the buildings seemed to have little interest in the unfolding election results.
When asked what they thought of the results, many asked ,"What are the results?"
"It's a shame that Robert Haines didn't carry the field," John Paul Lewiske '07 said.
Other liberal-leaning students contributed more serious responses. Some undergraduates expressed concern that Sen. John Kerry, the victor in Tuesday's primary, was "boring." Some self-identified Democrats were even more pessimistic, questioning whether any Democratic candidate would be able to beat incumbent President Bush.
Many students wondered if the Democratic candidates were too similar, claiming they're essentially campaigning on the same things.
Asked whether she was surprised by Kerry's victory over former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, widely expected to win the primary, Allete Vayda '05 said, "I'm not all that surprised because most of the candidates overlap on the important issues."
In Thayer, the lobby table -- once host to student activists from as many as three different campaigns -- was deserted. Dean paraphernalia littered the table, but the Dean supporters were nowhere to be seen.
