The words “Harvard” and “Republican” don’t typically go hand in hand. Only 12 percent of the senior class last year identified as “conservative” or “very conservative,” while 65 percent identified as “progressive” or “very progressive,” according to The Harvard Crimson.
This year, however, the Harvard Republican Club is booming. Roughly 150 freshmen have signed up this semester, and 850 students are on the e-mail list, the club’s president, Michael Oved, tells me. Club events regularly attract more than 100 students, Oved says, with some bringing in twice that. Recent guest speakers include former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy; the C.E.O. of the Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon; businessman Peter Thiel; the founder of Moms for Liberty, Tiffany Justice; and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In April, the club, which is the oldest College Republicans chapter in the United States, founded in 1888, hosted a Lincoln Day Dinner, a tradition of Republican Party affiliates across the country that hasn’t happened at Harvard in a decade. That same month, members of the Republican Club and the Harvard College Democrats debated each other before a packed auditorium.
“The Republican Club was dead after the 2016 elections,” Oved says. “This year, we revived it.” (Harvard’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Harvard Republican Club voted against endorsing Donald Trump in 2016—the first time in its history that it didn’t endorse the Republican presidential candidate—and endorsed him unenthusiastically in 2020, expressing some reservations over his policy stances.
In July, however, the club issued a four-page endorsement of Trump, which lauded the job creation and wage growth that took place during his first term, as well as his tax cuts, tough immigration policies, and “America First” foreign policy. “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” the club asked. “Most Americans would answer with a resounding ‘no.’”
The club, however, positions itself as a big-tent party. Among invited speakers and members, some are ardent MAGA fans, some are disillusioned by the current G.O.P., and some have never been involved in politics before.
“If we can cultivate excitement among all types of Republicans at Harvard, a place many see as ground zero for liberalism, it is my hope we can match that same excitement nationwide,” Oved says.
“The [Harvard] Republican Club was dead after the 2016 elections. This year, we revived it.”
It’s been reported that Trump and the G.O.P. are making inroads with Gen Z, especially young men, a generational shift that can be seen even at elite universities. This fall, College Republicans of America membership has grown from 2,500 to 3,500 students, the group’s communications director, Dominick Buehler, tells me.
I spoke to a dozen students involved with conservative and Republican clubs at Ivy League universities. Their views range from moderate to staunchly conservative, and not all of them support Trump. After a year in which their campuses became national stories amid protests over the war in Gaza, all of them, however, are exhausted by the inability to speak freely about important issues on campus.
For the last two years, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Harvard dead last for free speech out of 251 schools surveyed. Meanwhile, a recent report from Harvard’s Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group found that 45 percent of students “are reluctant to share their views about charged topics in class.” Those surveyed cited “concerns about peers’ judgment, worries about criticism on social media, unease about reputational damage, and fear about potential bullying and harassment complaints.”
“There’s a general distaste for how far leftist politics have gone,” Mariana Colicchio, a senior at Yale from a town outside of Miami, tells me. She is a member of the Conservative Party, an organization on campus “dedicated to exploring the Western intellectual tradition through discussion and debate.” While the group typically attracts 15 to 20 prospective members at the start of each semester, this year more than 50 students are seeking to join through the semester-long petitioning process, by Colicchio’s estimate.
She pins “the resurgence of the right on college campuses” to Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential race amid concerns over his mental acuity. “The moment where the emperor had no clothes, I think, was the moment that shattered the broader lie,” she says.
Campus turmoil over the war in Gaza has also driven some students toward the political right. “The pro-Palestine protests, whose last gasps have still persisted on campus, I think brought to light a lot of the internal contradictions of social-justice culture on campus and made people far more skeptical of what being kind of a leftist on campus really means,” Colicchio says.
That’s been the case at Brown University, where the Brown Republicans gained 48 sign-ups at this year’s club fair, compared to 15 last year, bringing total membership on their e-mail list to 175, according to the club’s president, Ben Marcus. “A lot of Jews that were affiliated with Brown Dems have now come to the Republican meetings over the Israel climate on campus,” he says.
The Yale College Republicans is active this semester for the first time since 2018, when the group disbanded following disagreement over the board’s endorsement of Trump and a drop in membership. “A few years ago, a lot of conservatives were relatively silent and wouldn’t really discuss their political beliefs out in the open,” Manu Anpalagan, the club’s president, says. “But now you see more people who are willing to speak up and more willing to share their genuine thoughts among their friends and within classes.”
Rising Republican stars who graduated from Yale’s college or law school, such as J. D. Vance, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy—who is scheduled to speak on campus next month—have sparked enthusiasm among some students, Anpalagan says. “There’s a more personal kind of excitement because students see themselves in these candidates. They’re not like these abstract people on TV.”
It makes sense that campus political clubs would be more active in an election year. The Harvard College Democrats, along with the student group Harvard for Harris, is canvassing for Vice President Kamala Harris and downballot Democrats in Massachusetts and some swing states.
But some members of right-leaning student groups say the newfound popularity is less about advocating for particular politicians and policies and more about satiating a hunger for spirited discourse. “It’s not intellectually gratifying to be a leftist on campus because you’re not necessarily being challenged,” Colicchio says.
“A few years ago, a lot of conservatives were relatively silent and wouldn’t really discuss their political beliefs out in the open.”
While the appeal is greater for young men than for young women—Gallup data shows that American women aged 18 to 30 are now 15 percent more likely to identify as liberal than their male counterparts—Colicchio says the Conservative Party at Yale has seen “a record number of very intense female petitioners this semester.” Marcus says Brown’s Republican Club has also become less male-dominated in the last couple of years.
“Any conservative woman knows that the gender gap exists in some of these circles,” says Lexi Boccuzzi, who served last year as the president of the Penn College Republicans. But she believes that having female leadership helped to make the club “feel accessible to a whole host of different people” and “also helped to debunk some of the stereotypes that people have about young conservatives, whether it be that they’re barstool Republicans, that they’re only guys, or that they’re not empathetic.”
Elite progressive institutions might attract right-leaning students who are more confrontational. “The Republicans that choose to go to Harvard are those that are willing to interact with people who vehemently disagree and know that they will be in a critical minority,” says Samuel Colchamiro, a freshman at Harvard and member of the school’s Republican Club.
Only a handful of Harvard professors’ personal ideologies diverge from mainstream campus politics. According to The Harvard Crimson, 77.1 percent of faculty characterize their political leanings as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while 2.5 percent identify as “conservative.”
When he retired last year, Harvey Mansfield, who taught political science at Harvard for 61 years, was one of the few remaining outspoken conservatives on the faculty. “When I started, there were still a number of conservative or Republican professors in the Government Department, and that number dwindled as they died off and retired, and they were never replaced,” he says.
Asked how the school could foster greater tolerance for viewpoint diversity in the classroom, Mansfield says, “The appointment of a few conservatives would change the general mood.” As for the students, he says, “It’s good for them to keep complaining.”
M. J. Koch reports on higher education and foreign policy for the New York Sun
