It doesn’t take a college degree to figure out Republicans see the protests sweeping U.S. college campuses as a winning election-year issue for them.
There’s proof enough in their plans for a half-dozen congressional hearings, new campaign ads and choreographed confrontations with student protesters.
Republican lawmakers are posting videos of themselves being heckled, creating ads tailored to swing-state voters and scheduling events aimed at ensuring the issue remains top of mind for months.
As he announced a succession of hearings, House Speaker Mike Johnson described his cause as countering the scourge of campus antisemitism.
“We have to act,” he said. When a journalist questioned why this stated commitment to fighting antisemitism seemed to exclude hearings into far-right groups like the Nazis holding public marches, he replied: “This is not partisan at all.”
The hearings start next week.
Republicans have convened the mayor and police chief of Washington, D.C., for a grilling into their reported refusal to clear out an encampment that began in a square at George Washington University and has grown to clog the adjacent street several blocks from the White House.
The following week, college administrators from California and Michigan are being summoned to a hearing into their handling of these events.
There will be more hearings — into whether colleges have violated civil rights law, whether that makes them ineligible for federal funding and whether foreign students arrested at these protests will be deported.
A group of Republicans used George Washington University as an eardrum-rattling backdrop to discuss this. As they held a press conference on a tent-filled H Street, those lawmakers were greeted with noisy chants of “Hands off D.C.” and “Trump lost.”
‘Kiss your federal funding goodbye’
A crowd of students gathered around the lawmakers. That included one far-right lawmaker, Rep. Lauren Boebert, who cursed as she tried pulling a Palestinian flag down from a statue of George Washington, now covered in a keffiyeh and spray-painted with graffiti.
“Kiss your federal funding goodbye,” she said, warning the college administration to clear out the dozens of tents.
A professor at George Washington University who supports the protesters expressed doubt that those lawmakers were motivated by sincere concerns about student welfare.
“I’m cynical,” said Ivy Ken, who teaches sociology. “So I think they were just using it as a stage, and I think the only photo ops they got were a lot of peaceful students singing and, you know, being clear about their demands.”
What the students want is multifaceted. Demands range from colleges withdrawing investments from Israeli companies and U.S. companies that supply the Israeli military to a ceasefire in Gaza to the end of the state of Israel.
While Republicans revel in this fight, it’s more awkward for Democrats.
The way in which it’s divided the party is evident in the contrasting reactions on Capitol Hill: some Democrats applauded police for moving in to clear out the Columbia University protest, while others condemned it.
The White House has apparently sided with the former, not the latter. In his most extensive comments on the issue on Thursday, President Joe Biden appeared to endorse law enforcement breaking up some of the encampments.
But he’s being pulled in two directions by his party.
A revealing statement from College Democrats of America zigs and zags carefully through the issue — calling the protests “heroic” but also condemning some of their rhetoric, then reiterating support for the president but criticizing his Mideast policy.
WATCH | About That: How U.S. campus protests spread to Canada and beyond:
Pro-Palestinian protest encampments are cropping up on university campuses around the world — including in Canada — and police are in some areas moving in to dismantle them. Andrew Chang traces the spread of the demonstrations, and breaks down what protesters want and how schools are responding.
How the issue divides Democrats
That intra-party debate was illustrated in a moment of disagreement on the Thursday morning show of the liberal network MSNBC.
As the hosts took in scenes of police clearing out the encampment at UCLA, Rev. Al Sharpton fretted that liberals appear hypocritical here, picking and choosing when to enforce public order laws based on their politics.
“How do the Democrats — how do all of us on that side — say Jan. 6 was wrong, if you can have the same pictures going on, on college campuses?” Sharpton said, referring to the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
“You lose the moral high ground.”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski recoiled at the comparison to an attack on American democracy: “Good lord, don’t make a parallel with Jan. 6.”
To be fair, Republicans also face accusations of hypocrisy on this issue. Some of the same people, notably Donald Trump, who condone pardoning the Jan. 6 convicts want the full force of the law applied to college protesters.
There are similar divisions over an antisemitism bill in Congress. The bill would define certain anti-Israel statements as antisemitic for the purposes of withdrawing federal funding to schools under civil rights law.
More than half of Democrats voted for it, as it passed the House of Representatives. But 70 didn’t, and some viewed the vote as a silly stunt designed to divide their party.
Even a House Democrat who voted to pass the bill grumbled to the website Axios that it was a load of legislative garbage that will never get through the Senate.
Predicting the political fallout
One well-known right-wing strategist says this is precisely what he hopes for here: to continue cracking the left, just as Vietnam-related unrest did in 1968.
“It will move public opinion in our direction,” writes Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute best known for almost single-handedly building opposition to critical race theory.
He predicted that these protests will never generate public sympathy like the Black Lives Matter ones in 2020, and said Republicans should let them continue.
Two pollsters contacted by CBC News said it’s hard to make a solid prediction about how this issue might unfold in November.
One concurred that it’s different from Black Lives Matter, or even Vietnam and apartheid, in the sense that the protests have divided American campuses themselves. But, said Tim Malloy at Quinnipiac, it’s still too early to offer a definitive statement.
Another pollster pointed to a potpourri of knowns and unknowns. For starters, said Patrick Murray, director of the polling centre at Monmouth University in New Jersey, the Gaza war is a very low priority for most voters. On the other hand, he said, scenes of instability at home could undercut one of Biden’s central messages — that his presidency means calm, compared to the chaos of Donald Trump.
It’s also worth noting, Murray said, that the school year is ending, and we don’t know what campuses will look like this fall, closer to the election.
“There is no data that can predict outcomes — especially six months ahead of the election,” said Murray.
Here’s another detail so essential to modern American politics that neither pollster bothered mentioning it: presidential elections are usually so close that even the smallest twitch in voter behaviour is enough to swing the outcome in key states.
So what is the sociology professor, Ken, hearing from her students back on campus? It’s mixed news for Biden.
“They say they’ll hold their nose and vote for him. But I would guess a lot of people won’t even go to the polls, won’t even bother to vote. Because, what choice is this? Two old white guys.”