Overall, the picture that emerges is alarming for Republicans and conservatives. In good universities across the nation, students flee the Republican Party. And the better the universities, it seems, the more drastic the trend.
To simplify: Republicans have gone from having a clear advantage among top students in the decade following the Eisenhower administration, to being competitive under the Nixon and Ford administrations, and from being an energetic minority during Reagan and Bush Sr. to being almost eradicated today.
So if we accept that the trend is drastic, that it is real and applies to most of the top universities and I think that is reasonable the next question is: How did this come about?
Some on the right see in these numbers a brainwashing effort from liberal elites on Ivy League institutions, rather than a brain drain from the Republican Party. People like David Horowitz try to gather evidence of how liberals conspire against conservative professors and students. To me, these accusations seem not only often to lack any real evidence, but also to lack substantial explanatory power, even when correct. Even conservative professors find themselves surrounded by students who vote for the Democrats. Furthermore, while students have fled the Republican Party, they do not seem to have moved very far to the left. The Weathermen are long gone. Hippies, utopian Marxists, socialists, anarchists groups that were prominent in the 1960s and 1970s are marginal today. Rather, todays best students identify as slightly to the left of center, policy-wise liberals who massively prefer the Democratic party.
If not brainwashing, then what? Partly, it has to do with a change in the youth vote overall however, that is hardly much of a comfort to Republicans, but rather a source of additional worry, since it bodes ill for Republicans over the coming decades. This change, in turn, has to do with cultural changes relating to gender, sexuality and the role of religion in public debate.
Partly it has to do with the inclusion of new groups in top education institutions, first Blacks and Hispanics, followed by Asians over the last few decades. However, in the case of Asian students it could be argued that Asians trend towards the Democrats precisely because they have higher quality education.
Let me advance another hypothesis. Todays top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. Its not the students who have changed so much. Its the Republicans.
