Will Democrats Turn on Universities?

Or will they need to suffer some McGovern-scale landslide defeats to reckon with their reckless "progressive" base?

Vice President J.D. Vance upset liberals and the media when he declared some time ago that “universities are the enemy,” and Trump’s attacks on universities—though falling short (so far) of the bunker-buster munitions that universities deserve—are having some effect. A related question is whether sensible, relatively centrist Democrats (both of them) might come to see universities as a deadweight on the party’s electoral prospects.

I have been saying on podcasts that I think there is a serious possibility that the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 could well be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is clearly making a play to inherent the Bernie-bros, and Bernie appears to be trying to help her become his heir apparent.

This prospect looks more plausible with the stunning result of the Democratic Party for New York mayor yesterday, in which the socialist Zohran Mamdani humiliated the non-comeback kid, Andrew Cuomo. Just a short reminder of some of what Mamdani stands for:

Here’s how the New York Times reports what the progressives think explains the election:

A look at voting data, however, suggests that Mamdani owes his victory not to the proletariat or even minorities, but to the usual overclass of university-educated prosperous white liberals.

Or, as the Wall Street Journal reports today:

Zohran Mamdani, New York’s unlikely new Democratic candidate for mayor, ran on a socialist platform promising to uplift New Yorkers with rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, and free bus rides. He was propelled to the Democratic primary in a stunning upset by a group of economic rebels just as unlikely: young, educated New Yorkers, many of them white.

Most electoral districts where at least a quarter of residents had bachelors degrees broke mostly for Mamdani over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Wall Street Journal analysis of preliminary election results and census data found.

Mamdani also performed better in areas where non-Hispanic whites made up an above-average share of the population, as well as areas with above-average populations of Asians and Hispanics, the Journal found.

Who produces these people? Above all our universities.

Smart Democrats (both of them) and responsible college administrators (if you can find one) ought to regard Trump’s attacks and threats as a great opportunity to do what most of them know they ought to do but are too cowardly to try: clean house of radical and tendentious faculty and programs, and rebalance universities so they aren’t woke madrassas that produce stupid progressive voters that are slowly strangling the Democratic Party.

Hey—wasn’t this guy the president of Harvard once upon a time?

Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer is rolling over on cue, worried he might face a progressive primary challenge next year.

I wonder if any reporter will ask Schumer if he sympathizes with Mamdani’s “globalize the intifada” views.

For several years now Glenn Reynolds and his Instapundit crew have been saying that “the Corbynization of the Democratic Party is nearly complete.” Well, looks like we can scrub “nearly” from that sentence:

I love this headline:

But read down in the story and you find this revealing detail:

Mamdani’s wide support, however, seemed to expose how Wall Street has changed in recent decades. There were more individual donors from major banks to Mamdani than there were to Cuomo, according to city campaign-finance records where donors listed their employers.

But many of them were among the increasingly large ranks of tech staff and other non-finance employees. Three Goldman Sachs software engineers were listed as donating directly to Mamdani, for instance. Only one financier at Goldman publicly gave directly to Cuomo, according to the records.