2016 Election Night

When it comes to funding for science, Clinton’s priorities look a lot like Obama’s. But Trump’s are very different. (SPOILER ALERT for those of you who didn’t see that coming.) In particular, there are a couple of big changes that a Trump presidency would likely bring to the federal science budget. First is NASA. Trump digs space exploration, and while it would be inaccurate to say Obama has been anti-astronaut or something, he has definitely de-prioritized NASA’s space-travel mission in favor of its earth-science mission (i.e., studying climate change). Over the course of the Obama presidency, the budget for NASA earth science research increased by 70 percent. His disinterest in returning to the moon, in particular, has been critiqued on both sides of the aisle. If a President Trump wanted to build bipartisan scientific goodwill, a moon mission would be a good way to do it. The second thing is the Department of Energy, where funding has been heavily weighted toward research on and support for renewables. For instance, the DOE’s budget for energy-efficiency and renewable-energy programs grew by 40 percent between Obama’s 2016 and proposed 2017 budget — while funding for fossil fuel programs (think R&D and clean coal tech) fell by 27 percent, and it was lower than the clean-energy budget to begin with. It’s likely that a Trump administration would reverse these trends.

The urban-rural divide appears to be growing ever stronger this election season. But at least one rural part of the country continues to vote solidly Democratic: the so-called Black Belt. Made up of a swath of counties that sweep across the South and have large African-American populations, these counties were solidly blue in a sea of red in recent elections. You can see an example below in the 2012 results from Alabama.

John Zippert, secretary for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, has worked with African-American farmers in the rural South for nearly 50 years. Even without Medicaid expansion in most of these states, which Zippert thinks is desperately needed, he said President Obama has been good for the region. He is cautiously optimistic about what will come if Clinton is elected. “When you elect Hillary Clinton, you don’t just elect Clinton, you elect the 3,000 people she appoints, including 50 from the Department of Agriculture that we are going to have to work with every day,” he said. He hopes that group will be diverse.

There are longer-than-expected waits to vote in several parts of the country. In Durham, North Carolina, a pending lawsuit asks that poll closing times be extended by 90 minutes, to 9 p.m. Delays or problems with the voting process have been reported in states including Colorado, Florida and Pennsylvania. I spoke with Pita Juarez of the One Arizona coalition, which is working to turn out Latino voters. She said that while turnout was strong, voting was slow in the morning because of problems with Wi-Fi and malfunctioning ballot machines. With people getting off of work in that state, she worries the lines will get even longer.