What University of Alabama students thought of the GOP debate | #republicans | #Alabama | #GOP

By 11 p.m. Wednesday night, the University of Alabama music hall that played host to the presidential debate had long since cleared, and crowds had moved on to one of several locations: if one were lucky, to the official afterparty at the Hotel Capstone; if one were rich, to one of the candidate’s invite-only galas; and if one were neither — like most college students — to the Cookout on 15th Street.

I nestled into a booth in the back corner of the barbecue chain’s front room. Every table was filled, even at this hour, by college kids. Across from me sat a pair of Alabama undergraduates: Trenton Buffenbarger, a thin redhead, and his friend, Lillie Phillips. They’d just come from a watch party at a glitzy apartment complex down the street. The lucky and rich watched the debate in person; college students, admittedly, were offered a nice consolation prize — the Alabama GOP’s rooftop watch party.

A few college students were among the real lucky ones, though, Buffenbarger told me. The College Republicans got five tickets to the debate hall, divvied out to their executive team. But College Democrats got five, too — “to be fair, or whatever,” he said, disgusted. “I don’t get it.” Buffenbarger’s group, Young Americans for Freedom, didn’t get a single ticket, although some of its executive team found other ways to get in. The rest wound up at the WestGate Luxury Condominiums, watching the debate on TV while munching on club sandwiches and fruit salad, next to the state party’s big brass.

For Buffenbarger, the whole thing was a dream. He seemed to be floating even hours later as he approached the counter, ordering his hot dog and double-order of cajun fries, still dressed to the nines — a gray suit, an American flag tie, a matching lapel pin.

“This is why I came to school here, for these kinds of experiences,” he told me. (He’s a political science major.) “And then they announce there’s going to be a debate, in my second year here — what are the chances?”

But Buffenbarger may be in the minority. Even at the University of Alabama, whose student body ranks among the top five most conservative of U.S. public universities, most students seemed largely disinterested about their university becoming, for one day, the epicenter of the Republican political universe. Hours before the debate started, several undergraduates at the student center told me they didn’t know an event was happening until they saw the signage that morning. One of them, a music major, was aware one day earlier — only because her classes were to be dismissed at noon on debate day to allow for set-up in her building.

The GOP didn’t do them many favors. Often, when a debate is held at a university, one question will be asked by a college student; instead, the debate’s guest questions were offered by a 55-year-old man. And when young people came up during the debate, candidates only mentioned them to cite questionable statistics about TikTok or slam their activism related to Israel-Palestine.

Whether this will translate to votes next November is anyone’s guess. Young people are notoriously difficult to poll, and even when pollsters think they’re charting trends, predictions fade into the ether come Election Day, when young voters rarely turn out. That isn’t to say they never do; only that every four years, when a huge wave of young voters is predicted, the tsunami hits shore as a puddle. A new Harvard Youth Poll finds that fewer people under 30 plan to vote in 2024 than at this point in the 2020 cycle, and the biggest drop is among Republicans and independents.

If young people do turn out — next November, or four years later, or four years after that — there’s little reason to believe they’ll flock to the Republican Party. Exit polls show that millennials strongly prefer Democrats over Republicans. And Gen Z is trending even farther to the left on policy — though not necessarily toward the Democratic Party.

The Republican National Committee, for its part, is trying to hold on. It launched a Youth Advisory Council earlier this year to try to get a foothold with the young folk. (A few of its members were at the WestGate watch party.) But many young conservatives are disillusioned with the traditional Republican Party, too, if their candidate preferences give any hints.

Among conservative, politically active students at the University of Alabama, Buffenbarger told me, Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump are the most popular candidates. Yet those are the two who are most vocally opposed to the party establishment — Ramaswamy, who’s pined for the RNC chair to be removed, and Trump, for myriad reasons, not the least of them his refusal to debate. 

Candidates like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley — who fit a more traditional Republican mold — have little appeal to Buffenbarger and his friends. Christie is too old-school: “I have nothing against the guy,” Buffenbarger told me, “but it seems like his whole campaign is just to go against Trump.” And Haley, he posits, would’ve been a great candidate in 2004 (when Buffenbarger was a toddler). “Her policies are too moderate for what we need now,” he said. “I know my mom really likes Nikki, but she isn’t as in-depth in politics as I am.” (His mother, not Haley.)

It’s Ramaswamy or Trump, then, for Buffenbarger and his friends, he said. Ramaswamy is “by far” more popular of the two. If the primary comes down to Ramaswamy and Trump, I asked, who does Buffenbarger choose?

He was about to take a bite of his hot dog, and he paused, setting it down. “I would love either of them,” he said. “But … “ His voice trailed off. “Trump, I guess,” he said. “He’s older, but he’s proven himself. Why not Vivek in 2028?”

I figured most of the others packed into Cookout would agree with him. After all, this is the go-to gathering place after political events on campus, Buffenbarger said — it’s cheap, convenient and open late. Buffenbarger said the members of Young Americans for Freedom come here after every meeting. But after Buffenbarger and Phillips left, I circled the room, asking diners — all college students — if they’d watched the debate. Most gave me blank stares.

Others, between bites of hush puppies, said they’d heard about that debate thing, but didn’t watch it. I thought I’d struck gold when Sanija-Lanea Aikens, a sophomore at the university, peered up from her tray before I’d finished my initial question and said, “Oh! The debate!”

She hadn’t attended, though. She just knew about it because of the inconvenient closures on campus. “It usually takes me 15 minutes to walk to school,” she said, shaking her head. “Today it took 30.”