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In 2016, NPR talked to 2 young Hillary fans. How do they feel after this election?
Jules Randell, 15, and little sister Bee, 12, talk with NPR correspondent Tovia Smith at their home in a Boston suburb days after Vice President Harris lost her bid to become the first female U.S. president.
Image by/Sarah Wall-Randell
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Image by/Sarah Wall-Randell
They showed up primed for victory, and dressed to party.
Jules Randell was 7 years old when Wellesley College grads, including Jules’ mom, gathered for what they believed would be a celebration of fellow alumna Hillary Clinton becoming the first female U.S. president on Election Night in 2016.
Jules picked out a flowy blue skirt, after learning that was the Democratic Party’s color, and topped it with a tiny T-shirt stamped with a big statement:
“Future president,” it read.
But that was the long game. Jules was definitely not aspiring to be the first to shatter that ultimate glass ceiling — that person “of course” was going to be Clinton, in just a matter of hours.
“I want to be the second,” Jules explained excitedly when questioned by this NPR reporter who was covering the event that night.
Smith first interviewed Jules and Bee, then 7 and 4, at a Wellesley College watch party for almuna Hillary Clinton on Election Night 2016.
Image by/Sarah Wall-Randell
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Image by/Sarah Wall-Randell
That election obviously didn’t go as Jules expected. And after former President Donald Trump again defeated a female Democratic nominee for president last week, we wondered about those youngest fans of Clinton and Vice President Harris and how they, in particular, were processing it all.
Both Jules and little sister Bee, who was 4 at the time, still have vivid memories of the hyped-up vibe at the Wellesley party, including cupcakes topped with sugar-based “shards of glass” and toy wooden hammers to mark the expected shattering of the nation’s highest glass ceiling.
“I remember the banners and the balloons and everything,” Bee says. They both only saw the festivities; their bedtime rolled around and they went home long before all the excitement and cheers devolved into despair and tears.
But both also remember the morning after when their mom broke the news to them. “It was definitely a disappointment,” says Jules, who’s now 15. Bee, now 12, says she remembers continuing to think about it — especially every time she sat down to eat on that laminated placemat her mom always used to put on the table, with little portraits of all the former presidents.
It was past Jules’ and Bee’s bedtime when news of Clinton’s loss broke, so they learned about it from their mom the next day.
Image by/Pamela Baldwin
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Image by/Pamela Baldwin
“I just thought it was crazy that, like, all of these years, there’s never been a woman president,” she says.
It brought them some solace in 2020 to see Harris elected the first female U.S. vice president.
“Yeah, I remember thinking ‘Oh wow, this is so epic,’ ” says Jules.
But this year, Harris’ loss to Trump hit hard. It felt personal and more high-stakes.
Jules now identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. When Trump talks about Americans being better off under a Trump administration, Jules doesn’t believe that applies to everyone.
“It’s a matter of safety for millions of people — immigrants and people of color and LGBTQ people and women,” says Jules. “They are all people genuinely in danger if they live in a state where they are not protected by the state, and that’s scary.”
At the same time, Jules takes a more sanguine view of the long-term.
Bee, pictured when she was younger, wears a T-shirt covered in cartoon female heroes like Wonder Woman that she says now feels outdated. “I don’t think it has to be just brave women who are actively doing something for the country,” she says. “It can be anyone.”
Image by/Sarah Wall-Randell
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Image by/Sarah Wall-Randell
That’s partly because Trump can serve only for four years, Jules says, and also because their generation will be old enough to vote by the next election — and they’re definitely paying attention.
“I thought it was really cool when I went to school and literally in all my classes people were discussing the election. Kids really care, and that gives me hope.”
Jules also sees it as a sign of progress that their generation seems somewhat less hung up on seeing a woman in the oval office than their moms were.
It actually made Jules and Bee giggle to think back to another old T-shirt of theirs that their mom once considered so progressive and feminist.
The shirt read “The patriarchy isn’t going to smash itself” and pictured a cartoon lineup of exclusively female heroes, including fictional ones like Wonder Woman and Hermione Granger, from the Harry Potter series.
That, to Jules and Bee, feels like a fusty old form of feminism compared with the kind of gender equity that their generation is fighting for, one they say advocates for a broader and more inclusive definition of feminism along with an emphasis on intersectionality.
“I don’t think it has to be just brave women who are actively doing something for the country. It can be anyone,” says Bee.
“Right, absolutely,” Jules nods. “Men can be feminists. They just have to believe that women have a choice to be who they want to be.”
Electing a female president would be a big symbolic victory, they say. But what matters most is policy change — and whether whoever is in the Oval Office is with them on their issues.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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