Americans are more likely to oppose than support campus protests

Americans are more likely to oppose than support campus protests

It would have been impossible for President Biden to please everyone with his comments Thursday about the protests that have popped up at colleges all over the country. The situation is complex, a reflection of the conflict to which they are responding. It would have been impossible for Biden to have even pleased everyone in his base, given that Democrats and the broader left are also divided on whether the protests are effective or justified.

Biden is also a politician, the rare sort of politician who is sufficiently good at American politics that he can win election to the presidency. So it is safe to assume that his comments were attuned to present the best possible political case. It was one of those speeches that you can reverse engineer to see what the polling on the issue probably says; here, that people are supportive of free speech (in the abstract, anyway) but not particularly enthusiastic about the protests.

And that latter point, as it turns out, is exactly what polling says.

On Thursday, YouGov released the results of polling asking Americans how they feel about the protests. Many people (about a quarter) said they weren’t sure. Of those who had an opinion, a plurality — just under half — said they viewed the protests negatively.

Older and Republican Americans were more likely to express opposition, but even among younger respondents and Democrats, less than half said they were supportive.

On net, it was only those latter two groups — Democrats and those under 45 — who were more likely to express support for the protests than opposition. Even then, the margin was only slightly positive. Respondents under 30, for example, were 13 points more likely to indicate support than opposition. Republicans, by contrast, were 53 points more likely to indicate opposition.

Interestingly, Americans generally agree with the protesters’ views on the underlying issue, the war in Gaza. Most Americans strongly or somewhat support a cease-fire in the war or view Israel’s military actions negatively. But the protests often included broader criticisms of Israel and centered on the issue of getting their schools to pull investments that are tied to Israel. In YouGov’s poll, a third of respondents had no opinion of that latter request, but those who did were more likely to view it as unjust.

One issue is that Americans are generally skeptical of many forms of protest. Last year, YouGov presented several possible forms of protest to determine how acceptable they were to the broader public. Some were almost universally viewed as acceptable: ineffective and inoffensive ones, like writing a petition, and ones that barely seemed like protest, like calling a legislator. Extreme iterations of protest, like rioting, were broadly seen as unacceptable. So was blocking traffic, a common tactic in recent protests.

The more controversial components of the recent campus protests — setting up encampments or occupying buildings — were more likely to be viewed as unacceptable than acceptable.

Notice that, even when this poll was conducted in September, there was a divide between Democrats and Republicans and between the oldest and youngest respondents. Democrats were about 20 points more likely to view occupations or encampments as acceptable. Respondents under 30 were 23 points more likely to approve of encampments than those 56 and over; they were also 12 points more likely to approve of encampments.

Democrats were about 30 points more likely to approve of the campus protests than Republicans. Younger Americans were 23 points more likely to approve than those 65 and up.

YouGov also asked respondents how they felt about the response to the protests from college presidents. These have ranged from negotiated settlements to forceful dislodging by law enforcement — with the latter getting far more national attention.

Most people were more likely to say that the response from the schools was “not harsh enough” than to say that the response was “too harsh.” Groups that were more likely to express support for the protests and more likely to view protests like encampments as sometimes acceptable were more likely to view the responses as too harsh.

Those college presidents align with the president on one point, certainly: all of them are eager for the protests to be resolved. The looming end of the academic year will aid that resolution. The protesters, meanwhile, are eager for a different, broader resolution — one that has no obvious endpoint.