A critic should be generous about this. They didn’t see it coming. At Columbia University, the editorial board of the student Columbia Spectator, which spent a better part of last year platforming the pro-Palestine-anti-Israel protests, offers this blunt self-assessment about their inability to anticipate the election of Trump. About perception, it was posted November 13, 2024. While the editorial is not claiming that Gaza brought down the Harris campaign, the student writers recognize their own failure to read the political map. They attribute the failure to privileged echo chambers; normalized refusal to engage with opposing voices; misguided factionalist discourse, and unrealistic expectations

After a tense and trying year in the wake of an ongoing political and human catastrophe, anyone who cares about students, the university, and the politics of Israel and Palestine on campus should give it a read.

The part that caught my interest is here:

Trump won. How did we fail to see it coming?

Notably, Trump’s victory marks the first time a Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote since 2004, before some of us were even born, and this was only the second time since 1988. As shock from Harris’ historic defeat continues to reverberate across half the nation, the editorial board, and those within liberal circles more broadly, we must ask ourselves: How did we get it so wrong?

Our failure to adequately reckon with the impact of increasingly prevalent echo chambers—both online and within student life on campus—played a major role in our miscalculation. Perhaps more than any polling error, our myopic focus, exacerbated by the media’s framing of the election, obscured the true feelings of the American electorate’s majority. While we easily recognized how bitterly divided the Columbia community remains on the war in Gaza, our focus on insular infighting neglected how our privileged position and political debates do not necessarily reflect the reality of the average American. Columbia’s socially liberal status quo, which many of us take for granted, evidently diverges greatly from the lived experience of the majority of the American public, for whom Harris’ economic policies failed to resonate despite post-pandemic inflation being the paramount priority for voters. Within this sheltered environment—upheld by a normalized refusal to engage with opposing voices—misguided factionalist discourse and unrealistic expectations for the election took hold.

The path they see forward is a recommitment to shared public discourse and engagement in local politics. On Israel and Palestine, it could represent an alternative to destructive polarization, an opening and opportunity to address in a substantive way the history and culture and politics of the conflict.