This article is featured in the 2024 Freshman special issue.
One year ago, most political forecasters were predicting the 2024 presidential race to be an electoral do-over: the first such rematch in a generation, pitting President Joe Biden against former President Donald Trump four years after their 2020 contest. After a disastrous debate, an intra-party revolt, an assassination attempt and an incumbent president forgoing a second term for the first time since Lyndon Johnson, those calculations have shifted. With three months until Election Day, the race has transformed into a face-off between a former president vying to return to the Oval Office and Vice President Kamala Harris attempting to become the nation’s first female president.
Campus reacts to first presidential debate
On June 27, Biden and Trump participated in the first presidential debate, moderated by CNN anchors Dana Bash and Jake Tapper ’91. Biden’s poor performance — due to his hoarse voice and incoherent responses — led to widespread concern about his ability to serve a second term. Following the debate, Democratic politicians and donors increasingly called for Biden to withdraw from the race.
Biden — who is the oldest serving president in U.S. history at 81 years old — had already faced widespread concerns about his age and health prior to the debate. According to a February ABC News/Ipsos poll, 86% of Americans thought Biden was too old to serve another term. Even as the President secured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, many wondered whether Biden, who would have been 86 years old by the end of a second term, would be up to the job.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Tapper said he had “no idea what to expect” from Biden’s performance going into the debate.
“I was surprised that President Biden had as difficult a time as he did coherently explaining his answers to questions,” he said. “…If the goal was to put to bed any concerns about his age or his ability to do his job, I think it is fair to say that he did not put them to bed.”
According to government professor and State Rep. Russell Muirhead, D-Grafton, the debate “destroyed” Biden’s candidacy and voters’ confidence in him “as a president.”
“That debate was the most catastrophic public appearance by an American public official in our history,” Muirhead said. “...The first 10 minutes of that debate were the last 10 minutes of a viable Biden campaign.”
In an interview a few days after the debate, Dartmouth Democrats summer president Quinn Allred ’26 said students were “anxious” and “depressed” by Biden’s performance. Still, Trump’s performance reminded College Democrats of the stakes of the election, he said.
During the debate, Tapper and Bash stuck to asking questions rather than engaging with or challenging the candidates’ responses. Some left-leaning commentators and politicians said Tapper and Bash should have called out misinformation live. Tapper, however, said he wanted to “get out of the way.” The goal was to get Trump and Biden to engage with each other — not the moderators.
“[Live fact-checking] would be breaking with 64 years of precedents,” Tapper said. “That’s just not how debates have historically been done on this level.”
Allred and Conservative Students of Dartmouth president Alex Azar ’25 disagreed on the moderators’ approach. Allred said he would have preferred live fact-checking to ensure viewers were not consuming misinformation. Azar, however, said he was pleased with the structure of the debate compared to the last election cycle because it prioritized the issues — not name-calling.
“In 2020, both candidates were interrupting each other, using ad hominem attacks, not letting the other speak,” Azar said. “I know Tapper has received some criticism for not interjecting himself enough with the candidates when they said a lie, but I’m more in favor of a hands-off approach. ”
In contrast to Biden, Trump seemed “very coherent,” “energetic” and “capable,” Muirhead said. The moment it was clear Trump was the “victor” of the debate was in response to Biden’s answer on border security, when Trump replied, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either,” Muirhead added.
In The Dartmouth’s post-debate survey, 69% of respondents thought Trump won the debate — though only 27% rated his performance as good. The debate, more crucially perhaps, affected the voting intentions of 56% of students: 31% reported being more likely to vote for a third-party or independent candidate after watching the debate and 23% said they were more likely to vote for Trump.
A significant majority, 89%, of students agreed with the calls of some prominent congressional Democrats and liberal commentators for Biden to step out of the race following the debate.
Campus reacts to changing landscape
Despite initially insisting that he would remain in the race, Biden announced the end of his reelection campaign on July 21, just 24 days after the debate, and endorsed Harris later that day.
In a second survey by The Dartmouth following Biden’s withdrawal, 84% of respondents indicated that they strongly supported Biden’s decision to step aside as the Democratic nominee for president.
According to Muirhead, Harris’s campaign has a better chance of winning several key swing states, many of which had been previously trending in favor of Trump over Biden. Muirhead added that he believes Biden had only “one path to victory” in the Electoral College: sweeping the Midwestern Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, essential to the so-called Democratic “blue wall.” Harris, on the other hand, now has “multiple paths to victory,” according to Muirhead. According to an August Times/Siena poll, Harris is leading or tied with Trump in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the four Sun Belt swing states that most pollsters consider critical to a Trump victory.
“[Harris] has inspired lots of people who were turned off by Biden,” Muirhead said.
After Biden dropped out, 80% of student respondents said they were most likely to vote for Harris, a significant increase in Democratic support compared to the first survey, which found only 52% support for Biden. In addition, 36% of students reported that Biden’s dropping out made them more likely to vote Democrat.
In addition to Biden’s withdrawal, an attempted assassination also dominated headlines this summer.
On July 13, a gunman attempted to assassinate Trump at a rally in Butler, Penn. Trump was wounded in the ear, while one audience member was killed and two others were injured. Images of a blood-smeared Trump raising his fist moments after being shot went viral online.
Still, the attempt on Trump’s life did not significantly affect campus voting patterns. According to The Dartmouth’s second student survey, the assassination attempt had no effect on voter choice for 87% of students.
On the national stage, though, the assassination attempt briefly reframed Trump’s image. According to Muirhead, the incident made Trump seem like a “very sympathetic figure” in the leadup to the Republican National Convention, which began two days later. However, Biden’s withdrawal three days after the RNC — and the rise of the Harris campaign — wound up overshadowing the “upwelling of sympathy and support” that Trump received, Muirhead added.
“[Trump] just doesn’t know how to respond to this new opponent,” Muirhead said.
Additionally, Trump’s choice of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate –– which he announced on the first day of the RNC –– has not been well-received among Dartmouth students, with 59% of students surveyed considering him a very bad choice and only 5% saying he was a very good or somewhat good choice.
On Aug. 6, Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz following a two-week vice presidential vetting process. Typically, candidates take months to choose a running mate, yet 78% of respondents in The Dartmouth’s second survey considered Walz a very good or somewhat good choice for the ticket.
Voting in Hanover and beyond
Granite Staters are heading to the polls on Sept. 10 for the state’s non-presidential primaries, to determine party nominees for local, gubernatorial and congressional candidates, according to the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s website. Election Day this year will be on Nov. 5.
Hanover High School will serve as the local polling station from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., town clerk Roberta Hitchcock wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth. Town clerks and election officials handle “pre-election preparations,” but Hanover residents can volunteer for four-hour shifts on Election Day, Hitchcock wrote.
“To have an election day run smoothly, there is an enormous effort by 80+ people!” Hitchcock wrote.
In The Dartmouth’s second survey, 48% of respondents said they are registered to vote in New Hampshire, broken down by 18% who are domiciled in New Hampshire and 30% who are from another state but registered to vote in New Hampshire after arriving at Dartmouth.
Out of the 52% who indicated they would be voting in another state, 62% shared that they will be voting in a “blue” state, 15% in a “red” state and 23% in a “purple,” or swing, state.
New Hampshire’s politics are among the most purple in the nation. While Republicans hold a trifecta in the state government, Democrats have only lost a single congressional race in the past decade. In 2020, Republican Gov. Chris Sununu won reelection in a landslide even as Biden carried the state in the concurrent presidential election by a comfortable seven-point margin.
The Dartmouth Civics Student Association, a nonpartisan civic engagement group, is planning tabling and student-to-student outreach to provide young voters with resources for accessing their ballots and information about candidates, according to co-president Bea Burack ’25. The organization also plans to host voter registration drives on campus to make the pre-election process “more approachable” and “accessible for students,” Burack said.
“We want to make sure that every Dartmouth student who wants to be engaged in this election … has the resources, the information and the time to be able to do that,” she said.
Jake Tapper ’91 is a non-voting member of The Dartmouth’s Board of Proprietors. He was not involved in the editing or production of this article.
From July 7 to July 17, The Dartmouth fielded an online survey of Dartmouth students on their opinions on the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle. The survey was sent to 4,517 undergraduate students through their school email addresses. 210 responses were recorded, resulting in a 4.6% response rate. Survey results have a margin of error ± 6.6 percentage points. From Aug. 6 to Aug. 10, The Dartmouth fielded a second online survey of Dartmouth students on their opinions on the 2024 election cycle. The survey was sent out to 4,369 undergraduate students through their school email addresses. 140 responses were recorded, resulting in a 3.2% response rate. Survey results have a margin of error ± 8.1 percentage points. Using administrative data from the College’s Office of Institutional Research, responses were weighed by class year, gender and race/ethnicity. Weighing was done through iterative post-stratification (raking).
Update Appended (Sept. 4, 5:44 p.m.): Attributions for this article and its graphs have been updated.
