This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Swamp Notes — The uproar at American universities’
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Marc Filippino
Protesters rocked universities across the United States this week. And with the US presidential election mere months away, the timing for President Joe Biden couldn’t be much worse.
Joe Biden voice clip
There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.
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Marc Filippino
This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about just all of the things happening in the 2024 US presidential election. I’m Marc Filippino. This week we’re asking: how could nationwide student protests over the Israel-Hamas war impact Biden’s re-election odds? Here with me to discuss is James Politi. He’s the FT’s Washington bureau chief. Hey, James.
James Politi
Hey, good to be here, Marc.
Marc Filippino
And we’ve also got Joshua Chaffin on the line. He’s the FT’s New York correspondent. Hi, Josh.
Joshua Chaffin
How are you, Marc?
Marc Filippino
I’m doing well. So, Josh, get us up to speed. You’ve been going up to report on the protests at Columbia University. How did these and the wider protest movement start? And how did we get to this moment where riot police are storming university buildings?
Joshua Chaffin
I guess like everything in this conflict, it sort of depends how far back you wind the clock. But the proximate date was about two weeks ago, when Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik testified before a House committee that was investigating antisemitism on campus.
Minouche Shafik voice clip
And we would do whatever is necessary to ensure the safety of our campus. Because of those efforts, the vast majority of our demonstrations have been peaceful. Second, we would . . .
Joshua Chaffin
Her testinomy, I think it passed muster with her Republican inquisitors, but I think it may have given oxygen to the protests. And then she made the fateful decision to send in the police, and that seems to have really backfired.
[PROTEST CLIP PLAYING]
The encampment really swelled from there. You began to see copycats springing up across the country. And then fast forward to just a couple of days ago. Earlier this week, a group of Columbia protesters took over a building on campus, and that prompted the administration to finally call in the police again.
News clip
One by one, police officers are seen filing in on an extended ramp into the second floor of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall.
Marc Filippino
James, can you tell us how these protests and all this domestic pressure is impacting Biden right now? How is he going about his response?
James Politi
Well, it’s been a problem for the Biden campaign. You know, Gaza has been a problem for the Biden campaign ever since the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks began in October, and civilian casualties have mounted because it has created a lot of anger and frustration among some core constituencies of Biden’s coalition. We talk a lot about Arab-American voters, but it’s broader than that. These protests have kind of fractured his base. On the other hand, we also know that if he takes a position that is too strongly associated with the protests, he risks to alienate some of the more moderate Democrats, people in the middle. So it’s a very difficult balancing act. And, just this week, he came out, was forced to make a statement on the protest and tried to strike that balancing act by saying, look, America is not an authoritarian regime. People have the right to peacefully protest. We have a First Amendment freedom of speech. On the other hand, we’re not a lawless country either. He’s also been exposed to Republican attacks that he’s been weak and feckless in denouncing the protesters. Donald Trump has come out and praised the law enforcement. It’s a foreign policy challenge, compounded with a domestic policy challenge at the moment for Biden, and it’s really hard for him.
Marc Filippino
OK, so you mentioned his base here, which gets us to the big questions about these protests and the election. And to get some insight into those questions. I spoke earlier this week to two students, Dalia Sabah from the University of Wisconsin and Noah Faye from Columbia University. They both have very different perspectives on what these protests mean. And Dalia, she’s of Palestinian descent. She’s been involved in protest on campus. And she made it clear that she would not vote for Biden this November.
Dalia Sabah voice clip
So I was involved a few months ago in the Listen to Wisconsin campaign. So that was a campaign where we wanted to send a message to President Biden and we got, you know, tens of thousands of people in the state of Wisconsin to vote uninstructed to communicate that we are deeply unhappy with Joe Biden’s policies in Israel. I think that the Democratic party has, for a long time now, coerced its constituents into voting for them by saying that the other guy is worse, Trump is worse, the Republicans are worse. And so therefore you have to suck it up and vote for us. It’s really about sending a message to the two-party system that we have now that these two parties are broken.
Marc Filippino
James, as you heard there, Dalia really wants to send a message to the Democratic party that her vote can’t be taken for granted. And her vote is important because she is registered to vote in the state of Wisconsin. What could that mean for the party going forward?
James Politi
Well, Wisconsin is one of the three key states that make up what’s known as the blue wall of American politics, which is Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three have held primaries already this year. And as she said, tens of thousands of voters in Wisconsin chose alternatives to Biden. And I think that if all of them end up not voting for Biden, he’s in real trouble in November. He’s in a situation where he’s gonna have to try to win the MAC, and there’s no guarantee that he will.
Marc Filippino
Yeah, I also, as I mentioned, spoke to a Jewish student at Columbia named Noah Faye. We asked her whether she was concerned that her fellow young Democrats would abstain from voting this year.
Noah Faye voice clip
I don’t know if they’re actually serious about not voting for Biden. You know, in the 2020 election, people were also having the same issue. They didn’t want to vote for Biden. But we all rallied together and clarified for everybody that if you’re not voting for Biden, you are effectively voting for Trump.
Marc Filippino
James, what do you make of that? Do you expect those young Democrats who are upset by Biden’s Israel policy to ultimately revert to his camp come election day, because they’re so upset with Donald Trump?
James Politi
I think the one thing that could really make a difference is if Biden is able to strike a deal or broker a deal for a ceasefire combined with the release of the hostages who are still held in Gaza. That would be a big diplomatic success. And it’s something that he could point to in the final stretch of the campaign. But I think there’s another bet that the Biden campaign is making, which is that ultimately, Gaza will not be the deciding issue in the campaign for many of these voters that while there is a kind of hard core of the Democratic base that is very energised, upset about this, that ultimately most young voters, most people of colour will vote on other issues, including abortion, the economy, the character and temperament of Donald Trump, and that Gaza will not be the defining issue of the campaign.
Marc Filippino
That’s quite the bet. Josh, you spent some time at Columbia, as I mentioned, and I’m curious about how you’re thinking about this in the context of major protest movements that have taken place during previous election years. I’m thinking about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where the Chicago Police Department basically went to battle with anti-Vietnam war protesters. Then you’ve got the George Floyd protests in the summer before the 2020 election. How have these shaped presidential races?
Joshua Chaffin
It’s funny, it’s hard to go to Columbia or to have been there and not to think kind of constantly about 1968. And it’s even more eerie because the Democratic convention is again in Chicago this year, as it was in 1968. But the disorder, I think, of 1968 has been sort of blamed for kind of a souring national mood or a manifestation of it. And as you know, the Democrats were the incumbents, and they lost that year. And we had Richard Nixon. In 2020, again, I think those protests also contributed to a kind of very sour national mood. And again, the incumbent, this time the Republicans, lost. I think one way that the protests are quite different, they kind of draw on history, but obviously they have the energy of social media behind them, which, you know, it makes it easier to impassion people and for students to organise. And I think another feature is that we really saw, beginning with the Black Lives Matter protest, is this fusion of many different groups on the left marching together so that you have groups like queers for Palestine who you might not have, you know, previously associated with the Palestinian cause, but you have a whole bunch of those who have now come together.
Marc Filippino
You have also, I mean that school is gonna end soon. So it’s a real big question whether or not this momentum is gonna carry over into the summer and then eventually the fall when school starts back up again and we head into the election.
Joshua Chaffin
I asked this very question, actually to a protester a few days ago at Columbia. Her answer was: our passion and the urgency of this is not dictated by the beginning and the end of the school semester. And I think with social media and smartphones and the rest of it, it’s gonna be pretty easy for these people. You know, they’ve all formed, I think, very intense bonds in this period, and they’re now gonna kind of carry those to different places and presumably link up in new ways. But I think it’ll be fascinating to see how that morphs over the summer.
Marc Filippino
All right. We’re gonna take a quick break. And then when we come back, we’re going to do Exit Poll.
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Marc Filippino
We are back with Exit Poll, where we talk about something that did not happen on the campaign trail and apply rigorous political analysis to it.
In a bit of fuzzier foreign policy-adjacent news. China confirmed this week that it would send two giant pandas to the San Diego Zoo as part of the country’s famous panda diplomacy. I am very excited about this because I love pandas. Josh, James, at a time of fraught US-China relations, could this gift be anything other than great news for Biden, or am I missing something here?
Joshua Chaffin
I don’t think much of it. First of all, I think the panda is sort of yesterday’s zoo animal.
Joshua Chaffin
Wow. Wow. Josh, this will be your last time on the show.
James Politi
And I think, you know, the Chinese send us a few pandas. They take them back. You know, we play nice. They talk about sending over another panda. You know, I’m done with the panda games. I want a koala bear or a meerkat, a Tasmanian, something or other.
Marc Filippino
You think you know a guy, really? I’m still getting over the fact that the DC pandas are gone. That was right in my backyard. James, what do you think?
James Politi
A lot of tears were shed on the DC pandas. It was a bad day. But this gets to Biden’s probably biggest, like, diplomatic accomplishment of the last year so [it] has been to cool down tensions with the Chinese. He’s got conflict in Europe, conflict in the Middle East. The last thing he needed was conflict in the Indo-Pacific. And it looks like the Chinese have, you know, have embraced that. And here we go. We’ve got the pandas back.
Joshua Chaffin
James, would it make sense to take a panda on the campaign trail?
James Politi
We should we should think about that. I don’t know. I don’t know how they survive in Wisconsin. (Laughter)
Joshua Chaffin
But then Biden can say, look right here. Look what I have. Look what I’ve done. Look what I’ve delivered to you.
Marc Filippino
All right. I want to thank our guest, James Politi, who is the FT’s Washington bureau chief. Thanks so much, James.
James Politi
Thanks, Marc.
Marc Filippino
And Joshua Chaffin, he’s our New York correspondent who apparently hates pandas. Thanks, Josh.
Joshua Chaffin
Thank you.
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Marc Filippino
Not that you asked, but there are exactly 185 days until election day, and the best way to stay on top of all of the US political news is with our new twice-weekly US Election Countdown newsletter written by our Washington reporter, Steff Chávez. Click the link in the show notes to sign up.
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we’ve got a link to that in the show notes too. Our show is mixed and produced by Ethan Plotkin. It’s also produced by Lauren Fedor, Sonja Hutson and this week, Kasia Broussalian. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. Original music by Hannis Brown. I’m your host, Marc Filippino. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.
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