Arjun Khurana, 22, of Harvard, Mass., is studying machine learning and comparative literature at Brown University. Here’s what he had to say about what’s motivating him to vote this election year.
I’ve voted since I could vote. I’m going to the polls this year because I think voting is important. I think it’s particularly important this year because I think a Trump presidency would be pretty negatively defining for the next couple dozen years of politics in the U.S.
While my political views probably aren’t dictating my day-to-day behaviors, I think they’re a secondary informant on a lot of the things I participate in. A lot of my contribution to the Brown community involves the Brown Design Workshop, which is an open makerspace. A lot of what we focus on in that makerspace is making resources accessible to the greater Providence community. And I think that credo and my commitment to that credo is largely informed by my politics, which is that just because my family can afford to send me to a university and could afford to give me the education to allow me to be admitted to this university doesn’t give me a greater right to the resources that the university has. Brown as a university takes a lot from the greater Providence area. And if I can push back against the administration’s tendency to just take, take and take, by pushing these policies in a more localized way to start to give back to the community, I’m going to do that.
My mother is a special education teacher, and so I get to hear a lot from her about kids with special needs. … It makes my understanding of the education system in general a lot more diverse, because I’m hearing from a teacher’s perspective, which is usually not the perspective that’s typically in political discourse. Usually it’s parents, students and policymakers. Also a lot of people in my life, here at Brown, study education policy. And so I get to hear a lot from their perspective on what these education policies are, especially state by state in New England. And then hearing that in contrast with my mother at one particular school district in a rural wealthy town, is an interesting contrast and it shows the diversity between theory and praxis of education policy.
I’ll be voting for a Democrat presidential candidate and most likely Democrat all the way down the ballot.
It would take some really significant campaigning changes to get me to not go vote for Kamala Harris this election season. And so rather than catering to my vote, which they [Democrats] have pretty secured, I think that they should be worrying about the votes that are more up for debate … I think the party should absolutely start catering more to progressives that tend to be left of center of party standards. [But] I think that they should not do that until they are already in office. I think that I and many of my leftist friends are happy to critique a Kamala Harris presidency – once that presidency is secured. But before then, we’re doing harm reduction, just, we will go out and vote for Kamala Harris in order to prevent a Trump presidency. And until then the Democratic Party should do whatever they can to secure that presidency, which I think will mostly cater to swing-state voters.
I would say to anybody reading this or listening to this — go out and vote. Even if you feel like you don’t have to, you should do it.
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