Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, The Crimson White reached out to both UA College Democrats and UA College Republicans, as well as UA students and professors who’d been in the state for many years, and asked them to make their case for how the state and campus had changed between presidents.
The UA College Republicans, after responding to an initial request and saying they did not have any members who had been on campus long enough to comment on how the University has changed since former President Barack Obama’s tenure, did not respond to follow up messages clarifying the subject of the article and requesting interviews.
Christian Norton, political director of UA College Democrats, said he witnessed many slurs as well as “violent rhetoric” and “derogatory and discriminatory language” at a pro-Palestine protest he attended on campus last year.
Norton, a lifelong Tuscaloosa resident, said he anticipated a return to “kinder rhetoric” for the post-Trump GOP and for Alabama Republicans, citing Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as an example of a “kinder” Republican.
“I feel like Donald Trump has emboldened this sort of politics,” said Braeden Vick, president of UA College Democrats.
Sam McKinney, vice president of UA College Democrats, said Trump’s “war on wokeism” had severely harmed the campus, and blamed it for the passing of Alabama’s Senate Bill 129, which prohibited diversity, equity and inclusion departments in public office
Norton said that Obama’s election was a key reason behind the integration of Greek Life on campus in 2013, citing Obama’s campaign slogan of hope.
“It just led to people thinking we could change racial policies and the culture around race,” Norton said.
McKinney said that President Joe Biden has positively affected students’ lives with his economic policy and his student debt relief.
“It has greatly cut down on the wealth inequality in America. You know, we as college students are earning more than we ever have and have more monetary power than we ever have,” McKinney said.
According to data from Gusto, a payroll platform, the typical wage for a newly hired worker between ages 15 through 19 came in at $15.68 per hour in June, up more than 36% from the start of 2019.
According to the Center for American Progress, $168.5 billion in student loan debt has been forgiven by the Department of Education under the Biden administration since March 2021.
Norton also mentioned the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare, and how much it has impacted him and other students.
“It made [my family] save money … I could stay on my mom’s health insurance policy until the age of 26, and it does that for every single student,” Norton said.
Norton said his family made too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough for private health insurance, so the ACA offered them a subsidized healthcare policy that enabled them to afford private healthcare.
Joel Teague, a senior criminal justice major and fellow lifelong Alabama resident, disagreed with the UA Democrats. Teague, whose father is an engineer for the Redstone military base in Huntsville, said his family has been negatively impacted by the policies of Obama and Biden.
Teague’s father did not qualify for the ACA, and Teague said his dad’s retirement plan has been jeopardized since Biden took office.
“The economy is not good for my retirement. I’m probably gonna have to work another 5-10 years,” Teague said his father told him. Teague said those comments were during Biden’s presidency and that his father’s retirement was looking great during the Trump administration.
Teague said inflation was also leading to increased tuition prices for students.
In June, the UA System Board of Trustees unanimously voted to increase tuition for students by up to 4% through the 2024-25 school year.
“I mean, I’m no finance major, but I’m assuming, you know, when you’ve got two major wars, one in the Middle East, one in Ukraine, it’s probably gonna make people very skittish about money due to rising inflation,” Teague said.
Teague described himself as a conservative but objected to aligning himself with the Republican Party because of U.S. involvement with the war in Ukraine.
“If we stop shoveling money to Ukraine, if there was a tragedy on campus and we needed assistance from the federal government, we could get assistance … instead of all our money going to foreign wars, with just a bunch of people dying over a spot of land,” Teague said.
He specifically mentioned the tornado that tore through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham in 2011, as well as Hurricane Milton. He said he was worried that the federal government wouldn’t be able to provide the aid they did then due to investments overseas.
Teague also said that Obama and Biden have taken away jobs from Alabamians. He cited Obama’s cancellation of the Ares I and V programs, which would have been located in Huntsville. This decision, he said, angered many Huntsville citizens, including Mayor Tommy Battle, who drafted a letter imploring Obama to reconsider.
Teague said that Trump was supporting Alabamian jobs with his efforts to put the Space Force headquarters in Huntsville. This was a decision that was overturned after Biden got into office, as he moved it to the much more liberal state of Colorado.
Both these decisions angered many residents, who felt that millions of dollars in growth for the economy as well as jobs had been taken away from them, Teague said.
Richard Fording, a political science professor who has been at the University since 2011, said the biggest change he noticed on campus was the rise of white nationalism since Trump’s election in 2016.
He pointed to the invitation of Jared Taylor, a known white nationalist, by the student group Students For America First in 2018 as an example of this. The speech was advertised as, “Diversity: Is it Good For America?”
Fording also mentioned antisemitic chalkings on campus last year.
Fording said that, although these ideas were not invented with Trump, “what Trump did, I think, was give people permission to speak out about them.”
“He made it acceptable, just to be explicit. It used to be that … politicians, they would have to engage in what we call dog-whistle messaging,” Fording said. “But Trump sort of rewrote the playbook on that.”
Fording also said Trump had an impact on voting rights and election integrity among students on campus.
“Trump’s accusations of election fraud, which are, in a very objective sense, completely unfounded … have led to all the series of laws that do make it harder for people to vote,” Fording said.
He cited Senate Bill 1, a bill enacted by Gov. Kay Ivey in March that increased regulations around absentee voting.
Alabama residents are a minority of students at the University, meaning many students, if they wish to vote, may have to vote absentee.
Fording said that in regards to the economy, he did not blame any results on particular presidents.
“What we found in political science is that what’s actually happening objectively, is so filtered through a kind of partisan lens and partisan media, that people see what they want to see,” Fording said. “In terms of [issues] like inflation, for example, [people] see that, but they don’t really understand how wages have gone up to compensate for that.”
Over the last five years, the mean hourly wage in Tuscaloosa grew from $20.82 in 2019 to $25.83 in 2024, according to statistics from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Alabama Department of Labor.
Joshua Rothman, professor of history and chair of the history department who has been at the University for 24 years, said that the biggest change he had noticed on campus since the Obama administration has been the shifting of acceptable political discourse to the right and the normalization of political violence by Donald Trump.
However, Rothman said that discourse has not gotten so bad that students were uncivil in his classes. He attributed that to the subject matter he teaches — 18th- and 19th-century history.
Rothman said that though American discourse shifted to the right during both Obama and Trump’s presidencies, it was not necessarily representative of the population.
“I don’t know that America as a population has gotten more conservative,” Rothman said. “Donald Trump has never won a popular vote.”
Rothman said that the increase in conservative judges in the Supreme Court under Trump has also given more political power to conservatives, but that it wasn’t necessarily representative of the American population.
“On all kinds of issues, the Supreme Court issues rulings that are, at least if you believe opinion polls … significantly out of step with what the majority of Americans believe,” Rothman said.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 case that decided abortion was federally protected and could not be unduly regulated by states. This decision directly led to abortion being outlawed in Alabama, with an exception for the life of the mother.
According to Pew Research, the majority of Americans disagree with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, though the majority of Alabamians agree that abortion should be illegal in most cases.
Three of the five Supreme Court Justices who voted to overturn this decision were appointed by Trump, meaning the change around abortion laws in Alabama is a product of Trump’s appointments.
Rothman said he anticipated Harris would be more receptive to younger voters due to her age, and also for her to be slightly more progressive on many issues than Biden.
However, Rothman emphasized that neither Biden or Harris were “leftists” or “radical” and that they were both very moderate.
“I would not expect Kamala Harris to govern from the far left,” he said.
Rothman said that what either candidate may do while in office will depend on what is possible and which party has control of Congress.
“Politics, in a lot of ways, is the art of the possible,” he said.
Editor’s note: This article was updated Oct. 27 to accurately state the nature of the UA College Republicans’ response to The Crimson White. The organization did respond to an interview request saying that it likely didn’t have any members who had been on campus under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. It did not respond to follow up requests clarifying the purpose of the article and asking again for interviews.
