Burns, 20, is an NYU junior who voted for the very first time in-person at her hometown elementary school in Norwalk, Connecticut. She felt a weight lifted off of her back upon learning that Biden won after the past four years of Trump’s presidency.

 “I was praying to God that love would win,” she said. “Joe and Kamala, as a combination, especially Joe, represent love and love winning overall over all these things Trump embodies.”

 She said that voting in person on Election Day was empowering and she felt a sense of pride as an American among her community at the polls.

 “It was really uplifting and also very easy, but also overwhelming to know that I held a power to elect someone into the most powerful office in the world,” she said.

 She said that she didn’t like the version of America that the country had become under Trump’s leadership.

 “We were at a fight for America’s soul and I did not want the America that I live in to look like that, of somebody who embodies white supremacy and xenophobia and misogyny,” she said. “When Obama was president, I think we were making a turn for the better in terms of social constructs and how we think about things.”

 Burns wants the very first change within the government to be better handling of the coronavirus, but isn’t exactly sure how to go about changing the systematic racism plaguing our country because she doesn’t know if it will ever go away.

 “I think that throughout Trump’s presidency we have lost sight of humanity,” she said. “The way he’s treating children and women at the border is disgusting, he’s giving people illegal hysterectomies and I hope that humanity is brought back to our country and that we remember that those people are still human and we still need to treat them with respect and love and try to be compassionate.”

 Burns said  she has faced racism, mostly in the forms of microaggressions, and hopes that these incidents will start to disappear with Biden and Harris’ leadership. 

 “I’ve had girls constantly talk about how I’m lucky to be Black because I have a butt and then grab my ass – in high school, that happened to me a lot,” she said. “I hope that because we have a black woman who is very strong and proud to be black and very involved in her culture, I hope that people stop doing those things and realize that we are a strong group of people.”

 Upon learning the election results on Nov. 7, Burns felt an incredible sense of relief. “I feel so much safer – two hours into him winning, I was sobbing on the floor,” she said. “I know that he believes in equality and representation and he loves me. He was willing to stand behind a Black man for eight years and here he is with a Black woman by his side. I felt relief – for the first time in the past week, I slept for 14 hours, because I feel safe now.”

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 A political activist in the community, Nelson encourages young people to vote, specifically in this election, saying that their votes do matter.

 “I voted because I am a queer Jewish woman, three minorities that are right now being oppressed,” she said. “With Black Lives Matter and the Supreme Court and Amy Coney Barrett, it’s important now more than ever.”

 Nelson hasn’t gotten her hopes up that Joe Biden will win after the initial shock she experienced when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.

 “I remember in my community going to school the day after the results and everyone just sitting and crying, ‘cause where I was raised, I knew maybe two people who voted for Trump,” she said. “Everyone thought Hillary was gonna win.”

 When Trump won, she said his presidency has proved to be much worse than what she expected.

 “When it happened, it was apocalyptic almost, she said. “However bad we thought the administration could be, it’s been worse.”

 While Nelson doesn’t agree with most of Biden’s policies, she supports him because he is being rallied behind by people that she does support.

 “AOC is on his task team to try to come to a compromise, so that’s a start in getting back to a country that we can all feel safe in and that’s actually accepting of all people and all religions,” she said.

 She said she feels personally affected by the rhetoric Trump encourages as a Jewish woman. So it was worth the trek  back to her Brooklyn home although she was taking online classes out west.

“He’s been so detrimental to the Jewish community and since the administration started, there hasn’t been a single year that hasn’t had anti-Semitic attacks,” she said. “My freshman year, my synagogue was vandalized; a few weeks ago, my synagogue was vandalized again.”

 But Nelson’s biggest fear is that she will have to keep feeling unsafe in this version of America; that we will have to keep living with the coronavirus and that historical Supreme Court decisions, such as Roe V. Wade, will be overturned if Trump wins.

 “I think ultimately my hope is that Joe Biden wins,” she said. “I don’t know if this is gonna happen.”

But she also hopes for a peaceful transfer of power and Biden to be able to start working on reversing what she said is the damage that Trump has done.

“We can start to work on a vaccine and work towards climate change and all these things that Trump has put into place and work on overturning them,” she said.

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