Keyanna Brown, a 22-year-old student at Buffalo State University, said she experienced high levels of anxiety during the days after the Nov. 3 presidential election as she waited to see which candidate had won. She felt unsafe because Trump was projecting that he would win, and after, Trump supported, rallied, and targeted Black Americans in the streets insisting on voter fraud when there was no evidence of any.

Via email Brown said, “My father was very worried and even asked me several times not to leave the house during the election and if I did, to be very careful.”

The anxiety Brown had was shared by many other young adults who were stressed and nervous that Donald Trump would be president again for the next four years. Young voters formed a crucial voting bloc, as their support for Joe Biden helped the president-elect carry key swing states.

The 2020 election was the most voted in history and had a huge voter turnout, especially young Black voters. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (Circle), In Georgia, for instance, young Black voters helped Biden win a state that had not voted Democratic in almost 30 years. 90% of Black youth in Georgia voted for Biden (compared to 8% for President Trump), and Biden won Georgia counties with a high proportion of Black youth by an average of 26 percentage points more than across the state as a whole.

“In Wisconsin, Arizona, and Michigan, we saw that a lot of young people voted, it’s really interesting to see that,” said Peter De Guzman, the research program editor of Circle. “I think that young people really expressed their voice in this election.”

The ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests against police violence have affected young people mentally, shaped how young Black voters view issues, and decide on candidates for whom to vote.

Keyanna Brown was concerned because Trump was getting a lot of headway in states that he won in 2016, and the results of the election weren’t looking good at first. But when the absentee ballots started to come in, Biden started to gain headway, and it was a great feeling for her. “I remember just thinking, we need change, we need something different. We can’t continue to live like this. We need unity or the country will not survive,” said Brown.

To get through her anxiety, she took a break from watching the news and stayed away from articles that infuriated her, read books, watched Netflix, listened to calm music that relaxed her, and had conversations with friends on topics not related to the election.

“I believe that this country desperately needs change and although Biden might not have been the most ideal candidate, he was definitely better than having Trump for the next 4 years,” said Brown. “I believe Biden and Harris will have to work hard to ameliorate a lot of the problems Trump has created while he was in office. But it is a step closer to unification and that I believe is the first step to making America, truly great again.”

Some people can’t vote because they weren’t born in the U.S, like 20-year-old Mayer Estinville, a black immigrant born in Haiti and is currently majoring in Finance at CUNY Baruch College. Even though he could not vote this year, he would have voted for Biden and Harris. He suffers from the mental and emotional strain of being an immigrant impacted by policies made by Trump, and one of the policies that allow him to live in the U.S and work was essentially being phased out by the Trump administration. Whereas under the Biden administration, they promise to keep those policies going and move forward with it.

He has had uncertainty and felt stressed out after election day. “That first night, everyone went to bed, and the Trump administration had a lead. It was like damn, my future might be at stake right now and literally, the last couple of years might mean nothing, given if things continue a certain way,” said Estinville.

Estinville felt a bit powerless and tried not to focus much on the election because there was nothing that he could do to change the direction of the results. To help with his uncertainty and stresses, he focused on his graphic design skills and had strategically planned for different options like if this happens, what are steps A, B, and C that he can follow.

To some people, the election is over, but a runoff election on January 5, 2021, will be held. The focus is the two Georgia senate races between Republicans Sen. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and Democratic Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. The focus for voting organizations like NextGenAmercia for the next couple of months is making phone calls and texting to make sure that young Georgians go out and vote to flip the balance of power in the senate.