Local voters and analysts react to Trump winning presidency
ROANOKE, Va. ( WFXR ) – Former President Donald Trump is now President-Elect Donald Trump . The Republican nominee won both the electoral vote and the popular vote for the first time in three tries.
The verdict came in the early morning hours following Election Day. It was something local political analysts did not see coming as quickly as it did.
"I was wrong multiple times (Tuesday) when I said, 'Well we'll be lucky if we know by the end of this week,'" Dr. Karen Hult , a political science professor at Virginia Tech, said. "Clearly that's not true."
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The victory made him the only second President, after Grover Cleveland in 1884 and 1892, to win two presidential terms non-consecutively.
Trump supporters throughout Virginia were pleased with what unfolded.
"I'm very excited and very happy with the results," Jamie Holliman, a Rocky Mount resident, said. "We wanted to make America great again, and I'm a huge Trump supporter."
However, not everyone was happy.
"I'm not very pleased with what happened, but I do think that, especially as a young generation, we need to be educated with what we actually need and what the country needs," Sheradyn O'Neill, a freshman Marketing major at Roanoke College, said. "It's not all about the economics, it's also about the person as a whole and what they're going to be representing the country as."
For the Virginians and Americans who did vote for Trump, the economy seemed to be a driving factor, according to Aaron Van Allen , an associate professor of government at Liberty University.
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"It seems as if the traditional concept that Americans vote with their pocketbook came into fruition," he said. "That number one theme with all of the exit polls came time and again throughout the entirety of the country."
Although Trump could not flip Virginia from Vice President Kamala Harris, the final results were a lot closer than what most polls expected it to be.
Dr. Hult sees it as a sign that the polls might not tell the whole story.
"What we don't pay as much attention to is what those polls are actually able to do," she said. "They're not making point predictions, we've talked about that before, but they also can't tell us if people are giving them any evidence of what they're actually going to do on Election Day, like whether they are going to vote at all, and if they are going to vote, for whom they're going to vote."
