The election shouldn't matter much in your decision. Things dont generally change all that quickly nationally to really have an effect. The finance and academic portion that you should really do your research on though. Many public universities in the US are run like businesses with the goal of providing minimal services for as much money as possible and enriching the administrators in charge. There are typically pretty hard limits on what they can charge in-state students so exchange and out of state students are their large profit centers. Because of that often the universities will not allow exchange students to take any of the core classes (unless there are free spots and there almost never are because the good classes are at capacity). Some universities actually keep their foreign exchange students in a satellite campus where they only interact with other exchange students and are taught the bare minimum is some sort of BS level classes. Of-couse they will change you whatever rate the market can bare so prepare to pay some ridiculous amount of money and get very little in return.