Beware of the Free Speech Voter
Elon Musk and Ohio Senator JD Vance have elevated free speech as an election issue, claiming that public and corporate censors threaten democracy by limiting the ideas voters hear, and what ordinary people can say. Many have looked the other way, focusing instead on a different threat to democracy, Donald Trump’s often scurrilous attacks on election officials and processes.
Are Republicans right to call free speech a sleeper issue? Are Democrats and Republicans both failing to assure undecided voters that they support the First Amendment rights of fellow Americans whose views they abhor?
No moderator asked about free speech in the presidential or vice-presidential debates. In his debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance had to interject the thought that the most widespread danger to democracy is “the threat of censorship,” which he said the Biden-Harris administration and its allies practice “at an industrial scale.”
We know less than we should about free speech in America because professors avoid studying it---in sharp contrast to topics like structural racism and climate change. Given the interests of academic journals, hiring committees, and funders, free speech research does not offer easy paths to jobs, grants, publications, tenure, and promotion. But we now have evidence that academia’s disinterest might not characterize voters.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan pro-free speech nonprofit, commissioned NORC at the University of Chicago to implement a nationally representative survey of 1,022 Americans on free speech and the election, conducted October 11-14. While most Americans are concerned about inflation, health care, crime, abortion, and immigration, 63% consider free speech a “very important” election issue. Only inflation (68%) concerned more respondents.
A separate FIRE study finds that 69% of Americans think things are heading in the wrong direction when it comes to free speech. As I’ve pointed out before in The Hill, data analyzed by political scientists James Gibson and Joe Sutherland in a forthcoming book find that 48% of Americans now self-censor, over three times more than during the McCarthy era’s red scare. What’s more, today’s campus purges, which disproportionately affect centrists and conservatives, have felled far more professors than McCarthyism ever did.
Americans are rightly concerned. The candidates should notice. As part of a broader alienation from establishment institutions, the free speech issue could tip the razor-thin margins in electoral college voting-blocks like Arizona, Wisconsin, and Maine’s 2nd congressional district, where libertarian candidates — consistent backers of First Amendment rights — have overperformed in recent presidential contests.
But this comes with a catch. Though clear majorities of independents and Republicans are concerned about their ability to speak freely in the U.S. today, most independents lack confidence that either party or presidential candidate will protect their free speech rights. Whoever can win the trust of independents on this issue just may win the day.
House Republicans recently passed a reasonable bill responding to the free speech crisis in higher education by prohibiting ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring and institutional accreditation. The bill also says college administrators cannot selectively enforce speech limitations, as often happens now at places like Harvard. Unfortunately, the higher education establishment (predictably) opposed the bill, and its very title — the End Woke Higher Education Act — was designed more to provoke Democrats than build bipartisan support for needed reforms.
Days before an election is no time to enact serious reform. But there remains time for candidates to signal their support for legislation protecting free speech on and off campus. One idea is to create a bipartisan commission to protect our First Amendment rights, much like the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and its 50 state-level committees---I serve on one---protect our Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Reasonable people may offer other solutions. Now, the key point is that this presidential election could well hinge on what the candidates say about what regular voters get to say.
