Tuesday night began with a mostly anti-President George W. Bush crowd buzzing about Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's chances of winning the election.
But though the night started out well for the nearly 80 students at the Gate, where students gathered around a large projection screen to watch CNN coverage of the election, all the enthusiasm and hope had been sucked away from the crowd by the end of the night.
After CNN declared just after midnight that Bush won in Florida, students issued a collective groan - it appeared likely that Bush would be reelected to office. For the rest of the night, most members of the crowd stared at the television screen with an exasperated and grim look on their faces as they contemplated four more years of the Bush administration.
"I feel like I lost my best friend," Colin Brown '08 said.
Pro-Kerry students, sensing the bleakness of the situation, were already looking forward to 2008 election.
"I think Bush is going to win," said Beth Stelson '08, a Kerry supporter. "But I have hope for the next election."
For most of the night, the Gate crowd was upbeat. They cheered and applauded enthusiastically when states such as Pennsylvania and California were put in Kerry's column and jeered when states were projected to go to Bush.
The crowd remained hopeful until about 11:30 p.m., when it appeared that Bush would maintain his slim lead in Florida.
"I think things look dismal," said Ellen Chu '07 as she left the Gate.
In addition to the disappointed Kerry supporters, some students said they felt "disenfranchised" and distanced from the democratic process, said Christina Kim '07, who couldn't vote this year - the first time she was eligible to vote - because of problems acquiring an absentee ballot.
Several miscommunications about the procedure for registering to vote left Kim without registration in her home state of Colorado.
Kim spent several minutes at the Gate watching election results before she left. "I'm a little bitter watching it ... I feel like I've had no part in the whole process," she said.
Despite the evening's overriding anxiety and despair, not all students were too engaged in the panic of election results to appreciate the value of widespread interest in the democratic process.
A citizen of the Dominican Republic, Gabriella Muniz Bobadilla '07 said she was just glad to see so many people interested in the election.
"It's exciting as a foreigner to see a youth so interested in the country's future," she said, "because where I'm from, young people vote, but it's not because they care or even understand the issues, but because it's an obligation."
