The Campus Radicals Are Back

Author

Bubba
05 Sep

The Campus Radicals Are Back

The start of the semester is bringing with it a new wave of controversial campus protests. (Washington Free Beacon)

The latest: On Tuesday, anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University blocked campus entrances, clashed with police and vandalized the Alma Mater statue with red paint.

  • Earlier in the week, thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators marched through New York City, blocking traffic and displaying Hamas and Hezbollah flags.

  • At least two protesters were arrested during clashes with law enforcement outside Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia.

Zoom out: Protests over the war in Gaza last school year led to the removal of college presidents and political tension, particularly concerning campus antisemitism.

  • According to a Crowd Counting Consortium analysis released in May, since Oct. 7, there have been 3,700 days of protest activity across 525 colleges in 317 U.S. cities and towns.

  • A Politico-Morning Consult poll from June found that 71% of respondents believed campus protesters were either "in the wrong" or "taking things too far."

  • One question ahead of the 2024 election is whether protests will sway voters one way or the other.

New York Times national correspondent Alan Blinder:

The usual caveats apply here: The presidential election is likely to be decided around the margins, so small movements of the needle in the right places can matter a great deal.

And surveys certainly bear out that some voters are deeply attentive to the war, protests and rising threats of antisemitism and Islamophobia. But those voters make up a fairly narrow segment of the electorate, and people in both parties cite gut instinct about as much as polling to argue that protests are, barring totally tumultuous scenes, unlikely to cause a groundswell one way or another.

Bubba’s Two Cents

The absolute top priority for Democrats in the coming months is winning in November. Dems seem pretty serious about trying to convince voters they’re not the party of left-wing radicalism. You see it in how Kamala Harris has distanced herself from her progressive past or how the DNC last month refused to put a Palestinian American speaker on the convention stage. To the extent that pro-Palestine protesters threaten these efforts, it won’t be all that surprising if Dems try to quietly starve the movement of oxygen (at least until Election Day).