Leading Democrats press an odd response to campus uprisings across the nation: dismiss and stigmatize the persisting tide of students pleading for peace in the Middle East. This flat-footed rejection of youthful idealism jeopardizes Joe Biden’s ability to secure the youth vote this fall.
The president first tried a law-and-order stance, implying that pro-Palestinian students — staking-out tent settlements in campus quads from USC to Columbia — are “threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear.” Then, Hillary Clinton claimed these youthful idealists, many attending the nation’s top universities, were misguided since “they don’t know much about the Middle East.”
The president’s support among young voters, already slipping before the springtime spread of campus protests, will certainly fall further, needlessly risking his reelection.
We have watched how a fraction of students have trashed campus offices (Columbia) and harrassed Jewish students (UCLA). But at half-century ago, anti-war and civil rights Democrats spotlighted the moral rightness of nonviolent protest, they didn’t trash entire movements because a few agitators descended into violence.
Biden ignores the complexities of campus uprisings as well, say, video evidence at UCLA this month, showing how pro-Palestinian students were attacked by peers with baseball bats and chemical spray as the insurgents displayed Jewish slogans and even playing Israeli music.
The president’s grandfatherly finger wagging threatens to eclipse what he has done for young people on policy fronts: reducing student-loan debt for millions, protecting the reproductive rights of women, expanding preschool for young families, pushing to legalize marijuana. Perhaps Biden’s deaf ear did hear the clamor on campuses, announcing last week that he would slow shipments of more bombs to Israel.
Still, the President’s appeal among young voters is shifting. He outpolled Donald Trump by 24 points among young voters, age 18 to 29, in 2020, a decisive factor in states won by razor-thin margins. But Trump trailed Biden by just eight points in March among these same young voters, according to the Harvard Youth Poll.
Young women, age 18 to 34, offer Biden some good news. They have been shifting to the Democratic Party over the past decade. The percentage identifying as Democrats has climbed five points since 2013, equaling 60 percent of young women nationwide. Just one-fifth claims Republican allegiance.
Yet, an equal share of young men has shifted to the Republican side, especially as college-going falls among males relative to better educated females.
The attack on student activists widens Biden’s generational gap, his limited capacity to hear and resonate with the moral aspirations of America’s youth. My own children, now young adults like millions of others, hunger for a less coarse society, a world marked by civility and sustainable economics. They yearn for far more than a bit less debt and plentiful pot.
No one president can ensure global peace or reversing the earth’s rising temperature. But he or she can speak to our highest ideals, to calling-out human slaughter, to lifting young families. Leaders like Barack Obama or Nikki Haley have not dismissed the ideals of our children, instead they echo, elaborate, and build hopeful policies from our best virtues.
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The White House also ignores history by taking the youth vote for granted. In 1972, after Richard Nixon beat George McGovern, I hopped in my orange Volkswagen, driving up and down California, nudging election officials to share precinct returns – eager to learn how students cast their ballots after 18-year-olds had voted in their first presidential election.
Nixon had sustained the Vietnam conflict, killed a national child-care program and efforts to desegregate the schools. It was a no-brainer: Would not California students heavily favor the anti-war senator from South Dakota?
But I discovered that – setting aside elite campuses like Stanford and Berkeley – Nixon won more than two-fifths of the student vote. Middle-class youth – most dodging the frontlines of anti-war protests – tended to vote just slightly Left of their parents.
If Biden fails to listen to and rally a broad swath of young voters, Trump needs only to match Nixon’s modest showing to retake the White House this fall.
Bruce Fuller, a sociologist, is emeritus professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.