One reason may be Harvard's geographical diversity.
"It's a problem that so many people vote in their home state," says Jeff M. Hauser '95, a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe College Democrats. "The races people care about the most may not be the ones they can work in."
College Democrat A.J. Figlioni '96 points to a much more basic reason for inaction.
"It takes a special kind of person to stand outside for November elections," he says. "It gets pretty cold."
Some Democrats theorize that the traditional liberal homogeneity of Harvard causes the lack of political interest among students.
"It seems like a lot of the reason the campus seems so apathetic is because a lot of it is default liberal," says Brian D. Galle '94-'95. "People don't get excited about anything unless they're a minority."
Shifting Politics?
Republicans, however, aren't quite ready to believe that the College is truly "default liberal."
Several say they see an underground conservative movement, particularly among the present first-year class.
"I feel that there's a lot of closet Republicanism we can tap into," says Harvard-Radcliffe Republican Club member Heather A. Clayton '98. "I'm disappointed with the attitude that everyone is liberal so there's no debate. It seems awfully closed-minded."
Bradford P. Campbell '95, president of the Republican Club, says that there has been a surge of interest in the club from the classes of 1997 and 1998. Many of the Harvard students rallying for Romney are first-years.
"President Clinton has been doing a great job of recruiting for us," he says. "We always have a large number of interested freshmen at the beginning of the year, but these last couple of years we've had an extremely high rate of interest."
But the Democrats still hold an organizational advantage over the Republicans as far as broad-based participation goes, Clayton says.
"The Republican effort is centered around the two conservative newspapers while the Democrats have a more active club," she says. "I would like to see a more active Republican club so that more people can get involved."
Other Republicans concede that although anti-incumbent fever may be helping their effort, they will never dominate the campus.
The current support for Romney here comes to a great extent from people who are tired of Kennedy, Greenberg says.
"Harvard is, has been, and always will be a liberal campus," he says.