By Rebecca Louie
In a country bitterly divided by the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Former President Donald Trump, the student organizers of Stanford University’s Democracy Day attempted the improbable: for a day at least, to find some common ground.
And by mid-afternoon Tuesday, with all classes canceled and none of the votes yet counted, they saw several hundred of their peers flock to Meyer Green–decorated with streamers and balloons in red, white and blue–and other campus venues to hear a range of political voices. “We’re really trying to get at this idea that in the face of … disagreement, we don’t have to become uncivil or dehumanize each other,” said YuQing Jiang ‘25. “We can embrace that difference by really learning why people hold certain positions.”
Jiang, who was born in China and grew up in New Zealand, stumbled across Democracy Day last year as a junior when pursuing his interest in voter turnout and voter education in democratic elections. This year, as the event’s Faith, Deliberations, & Civil Dialogue Lead, he was involved in planning faculty and student panels, including an “Across the Aisle” conversation between two conservative students and two liberal students.
Created in 2021 and celebrated annually, Democracy Day is a student-run initiative aimed at encouraging voting participation, civic engagement, community dialogue and public service. This year’s events ranged from faculty and student panels to election night yoga in Memorial Church.
“Across the Aisle” panelist Ocheze Ijeuru Amuzie, a graduate student and self-described liberal, characterized the event as a success in demonstrating productive dialogue and disagreement.
“The way the event was set up was to make sure that everybody had the ability to speak and get their voices out there,” Amuzie said.
Mandarava Jamyangling-Kawaguchi ‘27, the Communications & Media Chair, said there was a conscious effort to incorporate a range of political voices and campus groups–upholding the Democracy Day pillars of inclusion, diversity and dialogue.
“Politics is inherently going to have really strong opinions on both sides, but we do our best to market everything as nonpartisan,” Jamyangling-Kawaguchi said. “We do our best to get opinions on all sides.”
But can a day of civic celebration be even-handed when, according to The Stanford Daily, over 96% of Stanford-affiliated donations were made to Democrats in the 2024 general election? Some community members said they felt that the day was still skewed liberal.
“Across the Aisle” panelist John Puri ‘26, a self-described conservative, said he is able to voice his political views on campus, having published articles in both the conservative Stanford Review and in the generally liberal opinion section of the Stanford Daily, the more broadly circulated student newspaper.
While Puri would not describe the conservative voice at Stanford as “repressed,” he said “under-represented” is an accurate characterization.
“’I’ve been fortunate enough to take a lot of classes with Hoover Institution faculty and was disappointed to see their lack of participation in the [Democracy Day] events,” Puri said. The institution was founded by Republican Herbert Hoover, the 31st U.S. President, and is directed by Condoleezza Rice, formerly the Secretary of State under President George W. Bush.
As reported by Forbes and other media outlets, a college education is one of the political fault lines in the United States. In the 2020 presidential election, 64% of college-educated voters supported Joe Biden while only 33% supported Trump, and 57% of white non-college-educated voters supported Trump while only 41% supported Biden.
A divide exists—between the bubbles that are university campuses and the reality that is the larger America—and this extends to the faculty members who were involved in organizing Democracy Day, according to Tom Schnaubelt, who represented the Hoover Institution in the day’s planning.
“Are [the organizers] representative of students and faculty members at Stanford? Probably. But are they representative of the broader political spectrum across America? Probably not,” Schnaubelt, the Assistant Director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution, said. “The political preferences of students and faculty at Stanford are not a mirror of America’s political spectrum.”
Karina Kloos, the executive director of Stanford’s Democracy Hub, has worked on the Democracy Day coordinating committee for the past two years. Alongside the day’s sponsors — Associated Students of Stanford University, Stanford in Government, the Haas Center for Public Service and the president’s office — Kloos supports the student organizers.
“If Trump wins the election, it’s probably hard to feel like there’s space to feel comfortable celebrating that,” Kloos said before the election. “I don’t imagine it would be easy to be a self-identifying Republican.”
