Five years after the Stanford College Republicans (SCR) hosted conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro for a campus-wide event, the organization’s former treasurer Walker Stewart ’24 still remembers the “huge lines out the door and protesters everywhere outside.”

“You had an auditorium packed to the brim with people,” Stewart said. “You had people ripping down the flyers, posting in the dorm GroupMe or on Instagram, ‘This is so terrible.’”

In 2021, SCR launched a social media attack on journalist Emily Wilder ’20 for her prior involvement in pro-Palestinian campus activism. Three days later, the Associated Press (AP) fired Wilder for “violations of AP’s social media policy during her time at AP.” In 2022, SCR hosted former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. In 2023, SCR invited right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh to speak, traveled to Washington, D.C. for the March for Life and ran “Change My Mind” tables in White Plaza, encouraging community members to engage with statements including “there are only two genders” and “America has an under-incarceration problem.”

Stewart recalls SCR in his first few years as “controversial” and “taboo,” and the organization’s events as provoking “massive protests” and “spectacle.” He remembers that a student, at one point, threw a rock at the SCR representatives running the “Change My Mind” tables.

Yet recently, SCR appears to have quieted down.

Instead, conservative students voiced a growing sense of political disinterest at Stanford, and political science professors interviewed by The Daily described an exhaustion with partisanship among citizens nationwide. Both highlighted a shift towards increased community dialogue and civic debate on campus.

Since Stewart’s time in SCR, President Donald Trump has begun a second term in office. Trump has antagonized universities as overly liberal environments, threatening to “fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs.” He has cut nearly half the Department of Education’s workforce.

Nationally, conservatism is on the rise. A 2024 Pew Research Center analysis found that 48% of voters leaned Republican, cutting the five percentage point advantage Democrats carried in 2020 to only one percentage point.

At Stanford, at least anecdotally, students have similarly expressed feeling a slight “rightward shift,” according to Karina Kloos Ph.D. ’14, Executive Director for the Democracy Hub and the ePluribus Stanford initiative. Kloos estimated that anywhere between 10% and 20% of Stanford’s student population leans conservative. 

And yet, despite the re-election of Trump, despite Trump’s demonization of college campuses as too politically democratic, despite the statistical rise of conservatism in America and the anecdotal rise at Stanford, students noted a feeling of growing political apathy on campus.

Stewart characterized the political atmosphere prior to his graduation last year as “much less energetic.” After an SCR effort to shift the Overton window — the range of ideas considered politically and socially acceptable to the general public — students stopped responding to SCR events with the same passion, he argued. “And so maybe it’s because the tabling kind of did its job of bringing ideas to campus, and maybe it’s because energy just kind of runs out,” he said.

John Puri ’26, who writes an opinion column for The Daily often defending conservative values, described Stanford students as “more apathetic than open-minded.”

“It’s just that 80% of the student body, or so, just has very little interest in politics and certainly doesn’t want to argue about it,” Puri said. 

Other conservative students agreed with Puri.

Nolan Wallace ’28, who self-described as “right of center by Stanford standards,” said, “If you’re very passionate about politics, which I sort of am, it’s kind of hard to find people who also care.”

Thomas Adamo ’25, who now “leans conservative” after entering Stanford “super liberal,” argued that most students are “pretty apathetic to what’s actually going on in the world besides a small vocal minority on both sides.”

“I think the average student who studies CS and is trying to get a job at Meta or Jane Street doesn’t really care too much about politics and just wants to get on with their classes,” Adamo added.

SCR, by extension, simply “petered out,” according to Stewart and Puri. 

“They couldn’t get the people that they needed, the actual bodies in place, to do what they needed to do,” Puri said. “It kind of died out naturally.”

Still, Stanford’s student-run Democracy Day continues to celebrate political dialogue and disagreement. In 2022, Stanford Votes won a Ballot Bowl, indicating campus commitment to voter participation. A variety of student-led clubs, including the Stanford Political Union (SPU), Stanford in Government (SIG), Stanford Women in Politics (SWIP) and the Stanford American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) aim to foster civic engagement within the student body.

Instead of general political fatigue, political science professors emphasized a specific exhaustion with partisanship. Emilee Chapman, assistant professor of political science, told The Daily that “dysfunctional” and “socially divisive” party politics have led to citizens feeling “very dissatisfied with both of the parties.”

Kloos echoed that “part of the story could certainly be that what we’re seeing here on campus is a reflection of what’s happening in the broader context of the U.S. — that people are frustrated or disappointed or less connected to those two parties.”

Kloos indicated that partisan organizations on both sides of the political spectrum, including SCR and the Stanford Democrats, have gone dormant this year.

Current representation for both SCR and the Stanford Democrats did not respond to The Daily’s requests for comment.

Amidst feelings of political apathy and partisan burnout, conservative students expressed finding community in spaces centered around dialogue. Stewart, Puri, Wallace and Adamo all spotlighted The Stanford Review, an independent student newspaper presenting alternative ideas, as a lasting organization for conservatives on campus.

The Review “brought in a lot of the SCR crowd,” becoming the main organization for Republicans at Stanford,” said Puri, a former cycle editor for The Review. “Everyone on staff [right now] is hopped up on Trump fever. It’s like half the time, it’s a fan club,” he said.

Puri, as well as current Review members Wallace and Adamo, described meetings as centered not just around pitching pieces and updating on writing progress, but more so around group discussions. Meetings, they shared, begin with “listening to article presentations” followed by “talking through recent events,” “discussing different topics” and “debating people’s points.” They characterized the publication as not just a newspaper focused on writing content but also a “town square” centered around dialogue and a “social group” focused on meeting people.

Wallace shared that most other right-leaning clubs on campus are “low presence and very unknown.”

“If we didn’t have The Review, we wouldn’t really have anything else,” he said. 

Beyond finding community in The Review, conservative students also expressed gratitude for non-partisan organizations. 

Puri and Wallace both called attention to SPU as a space dedicated to fostering a diversity of voices. SPU hosts community discussions every Wednesday among student groups with sets of questions centered on topics ranging from immigration to free speech to diversity, equity and inclusion.

SPU President YuQing Jiang ’25, a former opinion editor for The Daily, emphasized that instead of mimicking the political unions at peer institutions filled with “political science majors dressed up in suits” and “very elite, exclusive, intellectual” atmospheres, SPU is “not a debating society” but a “vibrant, welcome space.” 

“You don’t need any prior knowledge, there is no dress code. The vibe is very chill,” he said.

Wallace told The Daily that “having actual good arguments on both sides has made me question where I stand and drift more towards some of my other peers.”

Puri said that Stanford, despite its liberal majority, still feels safe enough for him to share his conservative views. “Stanford is not a place where you are gonna get your head torn off,” he said. “It’s much more acceptable to be a conservative here. It’s not a mark of death at all. I don’t believe that I have lost any social opportunities here. I’m not a victim in any sense.”

And still, five years after the Ben Shapiro event — despite “some people who were pretty hostile to [his] conservative viewpoints” — Stewart remembers a liberal dorm mate reaching out after the event to extend respect across partisanship. 

“He left a chocolate bar with a little note just being like, ‘Oh I sometimes feel like I can’t express what I believe, so I respect that you’re doing this,’” Stewart said.