Since the beginning of the Fall 2023 semester, presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr (Independent) and Vivek Ramaswamy (Rep.) have visited Rock Hill, S.C., hoping to win over undecided voters and rally their existing supporters, all on Winthrop University grounds.
I reported on both candidate’s visits to Winthrop University, and noticed immediately the staggeringly low attendance and lack of support from Winthrop University students in comparison to other demographics in attendance.
There were plenty of cheering sycophants and t-shirt thumping campaign supporters that had come off campus from (presumably) the local Rock Hill and York County community, but not many Winthrop supporters in the large crowds brought on campus to see presidential candidates.
This was certainly more visible at the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rally, which brought over 500 attendees to McBryde Hall, all to listen to him talk about “the good ol days” of the 60’s and 70’s that he grew up in.
“I remember one of the greatest assets I had as a boy was the belief, which I had 11 years of evidence for, that my country was the greatest country that was ever created and that we’ll be an important role for the rest of humanity,” Kennedy Jr. said.
Kennedy Jr.’s speech echoed sentiments of a childhood world lost to a new and strange; AKA, the world that, for people like me and other Gen Z and Millennials in college, is just the normal world we live, implicitly created by the generations before us.
The Democratic candidate ended his campaign speech at McBryde by asking the crowd to vote between the options of answering questions from the crowd about his speech and campaign plans, or taking a crowd selfie with him.
The crowd voted to take a selfie, which meant no hard questions from the crowd or media. No engagement with what the candidate just talked about at our school.
Ramaswamy also spoke out against the “-isms” that had a chokehold on America, like “marxism, feminism, transgenderism, COVIDism, global warming” and other maladies of thought being imported into our country by China.
Statements and actions like these had the candidate and party loyalists in attendance cheering with applause, but raised eyebrows and worries with the indigenous Winthrop students.
At the end of the day, I don’t expect political candidates to come to our political campus just to cater to us and us alone. That’s foolish, and would likely just come off as disingenuous.
But it’s apparent when a speaker comes onto our campus to talk about their ideas, ideas that they want to bring to the very highest levels of political thought, and they don’t want to actually engage with the nascent population of thinkers to avoid get into hot water, or because they’d rather interact with their cheering, easier-to-please supporters.
You might not think we notice it. But we do.
