When Meredith Einaudi and her husband Marco Einaudi voted for the first time in 1964, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson smashed Republican Barry Goldwater in a landslide victory.
Sixty years later, they’re hoping to see Democratic nominee Kamala Harris do the same. The pair cast their ballots for Harris Tuesday at a voting center on Stanford University’s campus, energized by what they called the vice president’s relentless campaigning and commitment to abortion rights and environmentalism.
“She represents the values we believe in for a good democracy for all of America and not for a few miscreants,” Meredith said. “And Trump is crazy. And he’s a threat to our constitutional democracy.”
That attitude was far from an outlier outside the elite college in deep blue Santa Clara County. In 2020, Democratic President Joe Biden defeated former Republican President Donald Trump there by 47 percentage points.
And even as California voters mull a slew of consequential races for Congress, testy ballot initiatives on rent control, crime and the minimum wage–not to mention two fierce recalls of East Bay officials–the presidential ticket remained top of mind for voters.
Laura Murray cast her first-ever vote in a U.S. election on Tuesday for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Murray immigrated to the U.S. from Canada in 2007. Watching Trump win in 2016 was “the worst feeling in the world,” she said.
“So it was really important to me to be able to become a U.S. citizen and the thing that I was most excited about was to come in and vote,” said Murray, who also voted at the Stanford vote center.
Another first time voter, Adrian Pineda, 18, said immigration was top of mind as he cast his vote for Harris. Trump has moved to restrict immigration to the U.S. from Mexico since his first bid for the presidency in 2015. This year, he’s calling for mass deportations of undocumented residents. Harris supports a bipartisan immigration framework that failed to pass Congress earlier this year, but would have beefed up security on the southern border and made it harder to claim asylum in the U.S.
“Right away, I think about immigration,” Pineda said. “Especially with my grandparents having immigrated in the ‘60s from Mexico to the U. S.”
Immigration is also pressing for Norma Zabala, a nonprofit employee from Pescadero who originally hails from Mexico. She did not say who she voted for, but a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents was the most critical issue for her in the election this year.
“I want people to be able to benefit,” she said in Spanish. “After so many years, there hasn’t been a law that allows people who have been here for so many years to get some type of permit, residency, or something so they can stay here.”
Ryan Macasero, Hina Suzuki and Neha Mukherjee contributed to this story.
