‘Tis the season for political arguments, but unlike any other recent presidential election, the US is seeing a historic amount of political division this campaign season on the left, the right, and everywhere in between.
This is especially true within the Republican Party, largely due to their highly contentious presidential nominee. There is undeniable conflict within the GOP, with an unprecedented number of high-profile Republican politicians declining to endorse — and often outright disavowing — Donald Trump. Additionally, an unprecedented array of Republican establishment mainstays skipped Trump’s nominating convention, and a past Republican president has all but been confirmed to be voting for Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“We’re more divided now than we’ve ever been,” said Peyton Sumner, a junior at Parsons and the vice president of the New School College Republicans.
That division has carried over into the next generation of Republicans in campuses across the country, as many Republican college groups are struggling to appease both pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions. Conflict stemming from the question of support for Trump has shaken up Republican college clubs nationally, and, in New York State, it has even rattled the leadership of the umbrella organization for statewide Republican college groups, the New York Federation of College Republicans (NYFCR).
In one of this fall’s most controversial conflicts arising from Republican clubs’ reactions to Trump, the NYFCR expelled the Cornell Republicans from the federation for endorsing outside of the Republican Party through their formal endorsement of the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson, in early September. The Cornell Republicans threatened litigation against the federation, which was followed by the resignation of the NYFCR’s then-Chair, Eli Nachmany. According to his LinkedIn profile, Nachmany is the National Advance Press Lead for Trump’s campaign. A spokesperson for the federation stated that Nachmany stepped down to focus on electing Trump. The spokesperson declined to comment on whether or not Cornell’s appeal to be reinstated led to Nachmany’s resignation. After a new Chair was named, there was a “shakeup on the executive board,” according to the NYFCR’s Secretary, Adam Dohrenwend, and the Cornell Republicans were subsequently reinstated as a NYFCR chapter.
The New School College Republicans have not been exempt from the Trump-induced headache that has swept the party. They are one of many Republican chapters that have chosen to remain silent and not take a public stance on their party’s nominee. The chapter, which is The New School’s first politically conservative student organization, formed just last spring. According to Sumner, the club has been growing steadily, with a current total of over 50 members.
The club’s president, Lang sophomore Kirill Clark, said that opinions on Trump vary within the group as they do among Republicans nationally. “There certainly are some members who are not big towards Trump, and others who are for Trump or who are open to either [Trump or Clinton].”
Conflicting opinions on the nominee among members of the New School chapter have kept the group from collectively speaking out about Trump. “As a group, we don’t feel the need to endorse a candidate. We just don’t feel the need to,” Clark said. “Why alienate some of our membership?”
Despite the fact that formally endorsing candidates during local and national elections has been a fairly usual practice for Republican college clubs throughout the country, Sumner said that The New School’s chapter does not plan on taking a stance during its first election as a club. “The club isn’t about pushing candidates,” he said. “We’re not saying you need to vote for Donald Trump, you need to vote for Gary Johnson, you need to vote for Hillary Clinton. That’s not what we’re saying. Really what we’re trying to do is getting people active in the community and getting people to have a voice.”
Both Clark and Sumner declined to comment on their personal positions with regards to the current candidates, but last April, during the presidential primaries, Sumner told The New School Free Press, “I don’t feel like anybody in the race, Democrat or Republican, is fit to be president.”
On Donald Trump, he had added, “I feel like a lot of people [at The New School] think that, ‘oh, Republicans are so terrible.’ But they don’t actually know because they’ve never been around most Republicans. They’ve only seen what they see on TV, like Donald Trump — people that do not represent most people’s opinions.” Sumner did not reply to the NSFP’s requests for comment on these quotes.
The New School College Republicans is a chapter of the statewide New York Federation of College Republicans, which itself is a chapter of the national organization for Republican college groups, the College Republican National Committee (CRNC).
NYFCR Secretary and SUNY Geneseo senior, Adam Dohrenwend, spoke to the NSFP on behalf of the federation. He described the purpose of the NYFCR as “an umbrella, a form of organization to foster connections, relationships, discussion, debate between chapters.” It provides funding for individual chapters throughout the state and connects them to the CRNC, which describes itself as “the grassroots arm” of the national Republican Party.
In what the New York Times called “mutiny” on some campuses, official Trump endorsements by CRNC-affiliated groups have led to the creation of new, anti-Trump Republican clubs arising from prominent chapters, such as the one at Yale. The president of Harvard’s Republican chapter has even publicly said he’ll vote for Clinton over Trump.
In New York State, there’s no available data on how many college Republican chapters have endorsed Trump, disavowed him, or refused to do either, as the New School College Republicans did. Dohrenwend, the NYFCR’s Secretary, said he doesn’t know the breakdown exactly, and Clark, who himself is on the executive board of the federation, said that there’s “been a mix” of public reactions to Trump by chapters in the state.
The most prominent endorsement from a NYFCR chapter this election season has been Cornell’s endorsement of the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, which came after their sharp denouncement of Trump.
Most chapters have not been as straightforward as Cornell about where they stand on their party’s nominee. The NSFP reached out to all eleven of the NYFCR chapters in the New York City area about their stances on Trump. By press time, none of them had replied to the NSFP’s requests for comment.
The Columbia University College Republicans publicly declined to take an official stance on Trump, stating that their constitution prohibits them from endorsing or disavowing candidates. However, they publicly endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012.
The NYU College Republicans also declined to take a public and official stance on Trump, citing the fact that they have never before endorsed candidates at any level. However, in response to a Washington Square News story about the Republican divide over Trump, they recently stated on their Facebook page, “Our members are doing everything they can to get Trump and other Republican candidates elected this year. We have never in our history as a club put out unless [sic] endorsement statements as we pride actions over words.”
The Fordham University College Republicans told the Fordham Ram that they were split with regards to their members’ support for Trump, and they have yet to decide whether or not they will officially endorse him.
Dohrenwend noted that, in most elections, endorsements of the Republican nominee aren’t usually a big question, but this year has been an “anomaly,” he said, adding that, for NYFCR and its chapters, “it’s a tricky situation.” With regards to the Federation’s official stance on endorsements this year after Cornell’s reinstatement, he said, “Individual chapters are deciding how they’re going to proceed. The Federation prefers that if they’re not going to endorse Trump, then they don’t have to make an endorsement.”
Photo by Julia Himmel