Will the College Protests Matter in November?

Good evening! College students are returning to campus, and with them comes the potential for new campus protests. Alan Blinder, who covers higher education for The Times, takes a look at a big question that could shape the weeks between now and Election Day. — Jess Bidgood

Campus protests over the war in Gaza made headlines last school year, helping topple college presidents and giving Republicans an opening to portray Democrats as weak and accuse academics of doing too little to stop antisemitism.

That has injected back-to-school season with a little more political tension than usual. Republicans pledged in their party platform to make campuses “safe and patriotic again,” and they may be hoping that new scenes of chaos on campus can help them blunt Democratic momentum after a summer of political upheaval.

It’s far from clear, however, that protests will return this fall with the same intensity of the spring, or how much attention voters will pay if they do.

I cover higher education for The New York Times, and reported extensively on the campus protests and their fallout, which spurred testy hearings on Capitol Hill and even became fodder for “Saturday Night Live.”

Tonight, I’m taking a look at why this fall might feel different from the last academic year — and why political strategists on both sides of the partisan divide doubt that protests and the Republican attacks on universities that have come with them will significantly sway voters.

“Republicans have developed the theory or something that higher education is the gateway drug to socialism, and I’ve never thought that was very powerful,” said Stuart Stevens, a top strategist for the 2012 Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is now a senator from Utah.

A new semester

The protests predictably lost much of their momentum during summer break — and campuses may not feel quite the same to returning student activists for other reasons, too.

There is the natural turnover of student bodies, which means some protesters have graduated. Moreover, many universities are still sorting through disciplinary proceedings related to last semester, which may sideline some demonstrators for weeks or months.

Colleges, whose leaders are eager to keep the campaign spotlight off their campuses, are also taking steps aimed at taming future protests. They have rolled out new rules — the University of California system, for example, ordered its campuses to make certain that encampments and “masking to conceal identity” were banned — although we aren’t sure how much schools will enforce their new policies.

Protesters have vowed to keep at it. In a guest column in The Columbia Daily Spectator in August, a coalition of student groups reiterated a roster of demands and said that “our student protesters have shown that, no matter the individual cost, we will keep fighting until and after our university is truly liberated.”

But it is unknowable how events on the ground in Gaza will unfold, or how they might influence protesters in the United States.

Doubts on both sides

If university leaders get their wish for a more muted protest season, Republicans will have fewer chances to argue to voters — most of whom have already said they have higher priorities than college demonstrations — that the nation’s campuses have become hotbeds of havoc.

“Unless there is an elevated level of violence that goes with the protests, it doesn’t rise,” said former Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, who directs the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. She added that she sensed Republicans had “exaggerated the kind of attention the rest of the country is paying to campus protests.”

(Heitkamp has more close-up experience with protesters than most people do: In May, she defied three demonstrators who ordered her from her office.)

Even if protests flare up, Angi Horn, a Republican strategist in Alabama, predicted that voters in her part of the country would notice events elsewhere but probably deem most protests irrelevant.

And Stevens suggested that the Republican strategy had a more foundational problem: that for all of the longstanding skepticism of elite universities, plenty of American families still save for school and watch college football.

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.

An unpopular movement

Polling from the spring suggested that, despite the protests, the war in Gaza was not actually a top priority for young voters. Other polling suggested that although the protests were broadly unpopular or concerning, other issues were generally more potent.

A poll commissioned by Politico and Morning Consult and conducted in late May found that 71 percent of respondents believed that campus protesters were either “in the wrong” or “in the right but taking things too far.” Nearly as many respondents favored, to some degree, universities’ expelling students who broke laws or campus policies.

Those kinds of numbers may help explain why Republicans are still eager to take swings at protesters and university administrators.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking House Republican and a Harvard alumna who has been one of her party’s most visible crusaders on campus protests, declined to be interviewed. Sam DeMarco, an at-large member of the County Council in the Pittsburgh area, said he routinely heard from Jewish voters who were disturbed by protests they saw as disorderly and antisemitic.

“I don’t know to what extent it’s going to make a difference here, but I know that there are members of the community who are bothered by it, and it will be an issue,” said DeMarco, a staunch supporter of Israel who is also the chairman of the Republican Committee of Allegheny County.

Promises from protesters to demonstrate on college plazas deep into the fall, he suggested, could attract the attention of other voters if campuses turn unruly.

— Annie Karni contributed reporting.

Project 2025 unpopular in swing districts, Democrats’ polling shows

House Democrats are making Project 2025 a major part of their campaign to retake the chamber. My colleague Luke Broadwater, who covers Congress, has an exclusive look at their polling, which they will use to craft their message.

New polling from a political action committee that helps elect House Democrats shows that the conservative Project 2025 set of policy plans is unpopular in the swing districts that could help decide which party controls the House.

The polling is an indication that House Democrats will try to tie Republican lawmakers to the plans laid out in the nearly 900-page Project 2025 document that was created by allies of former President Donald Trump.

A memo from the political action committee states that Project 2025 ranks as the least popular policy in battleground districts. Voters were about five times more likely to hold unfavorable views toward Project 2025 as favorable ones in key House districts in Arizona, Oregon and Washington, among others.

The poll shows similar results in races from Michigan to Pennsylvania.

The Democrats’ polling is consistent with several national polls, from YouGov and Navigator Research, a Democratic polling operation, which showed the plan was unpopular nationally.

Polls like these, which are known as message-testing, aren’t always a great indication of voters’ feelings. For one, these questions are being asked by partisan pollsters who might be crafting the message slightly differently than their political opponents. But also, because of the nature of these polls, these messages are often received in a vacuum, which does not necessarily match how voters experience things. Other polling shows that most voters have not heard of Project 2025.

But results like these are fodder for Democratic efforts to define those plans and to link Trump and congressional Republicans to them in voters’ minds. Democrats spent considerable time at the Democratic National Convention focusing on Project 2025, and given their latest poll results, are likely to continue to highlight the proposals in down-ballot races where control of the House is at stake.

— Luke Broadwater

Tell us: How are you feeling about next week’s presidential debate?

The presidential debate next Tuesday will be the first time that former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris face off onstage. And it could be the most important moment of the fall campaign.

I want to know how you’re feeling about it. Are you planning to watch? Are you excited? Are you dreading it? And what do you want to see the candidates asked about?