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Charlie Kirk was certainly famous—in politics, on campuses, in the halls of Donald Trump’s White House. But I imagine that, for plenty of sports fans attending Major League Baseball or NFL games over the weekend, it must have been a tad confusing to peer up from the stands and see Kirk’s square-jawed face on stadium jumbotrons. A bunch of teams—from the New York Yankees to the Dallas Cowboys to the LSU Tigers—honored Kirk this way, with tributes and a moment of silence.

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As John Heilemann and I discussed on today’s episode of The Powers That Be, some of these teams were probably honoring Kirk with sincerity, a gesture toward their red-state fan bases. But it also seems rather obvious that team owners were trying to get on the good side of a vengeful and litigious president, who had just lost one of his top loyalists to an assassin’s bullet. When was the last time a political figure—let alone someone as divisive as Kirk—was honored around the country at sporting events? I can’t think of a single one. Inside the stadiums, the receptions were mixed. When the New Orleans Saints asked for a moment of silence to honor Kirk, he was met with a range of cheers and boos. But it’s also not hard to imagine some Abita-swilling Saints fan hearing Kirk’s name in the Superdome and saying to himself, Who?

The seemingly inescapable paeans to Kirk are the consequence of a political culture dominated by the Very Online—including the men and women who staff the Trump White House and credit the Turning Point USA founder for building a MAGA media culture that drew younger voters into the Republican fold. They are correct about Kirk’s organizational prowess. He was a workhorse political organizer; when I was reporting from college campuses in swing states last fall, Kirk and I kept in close touch about the college towns and counties he was trying to flip to Trump with red-hatted TPUSA organizers.

But even though Kirk had a massive online following and powerful friends in the White House, it needs to be said that even among college students, Kirk was not popular at all. Yes, it was a spectacle if he arrived on your campus, a bonanza of lib-owning and rhetorical combat all recorded for YouTube posterity. But the majority of students on those campuses stayed away. Never forget: For most Americans, politics remains pretty damn tedious.

I’ve obtained fresh polling from Generation Lab, an outfit that surveys college students about politics and society, that bears out these mixed feelings. They polled a sample of 1,030 college students—enrolled at community colleges, technical colleges, trade schools, and public and private four-year institutions—in the two days following Kirk’s death for a sense of how his assassination was being processed on the campuses he so loved to visit. First things first: Generation Lab found that Kirk was almost universally known among college kids: 94 percent of students had heard of him, a remarkable level of name I.D. for any political figure.

However, most college students were not fans of the right-wing provocateur at all, the poll found. A combined 70 percent of students said they either “strongly disagree” or “somewhat disagree” with Kirk’s views. Only 30 percent said they agreed.

This result undercuts some of Trump’s mythmaking about Kirk and young voters. Trump often claims to have won Gen Z voters in the 2024 election, which is not true. While Trump narrowly won young men, thanks in part to Kirk’s hard work, young voters overall broke for Kamala Harris. The poll also found that white students were more likely to agree with Kirk’s views than Black or Latino students. And it uncovered that students at two-year colleges were more likely to agree with Kirk than students at four-year colleges or universities. Young men were also 10 points more likely to agree with Kirk than young women.

One bright spot in the poll: Despite recent social media posts from angry young liberals dancing on Kirk’s grave—evidence of “hate speech” from the left, according to the White House—the vast majority of college students disagreed with the question: Do you think it is ever okay to physically harm someone because of their political beliefs? Among students, 86 percent said no, while just 13 percent responded, “Yes, it’s okay in some cases.” A statistically insignificant 1 percent of students said physical harm is okay in many cases. “It’s a fringe view, but one that’s had the worst consequences,” said Cyrus Beschloss, the founder of Generation Lab.

The polling firm also found that most college students didn’t regularly watch or listen to Kirk’s content: 36 percent said they never listened to or watched Kirk in the past year, while another 33 percent said they had engaged “once or twice.” Meanwhile, a combined 30 percent said they watched or listened to Kirk “a few times per month,” “a few times per week,” or daily. That’s not a small number—any legacy media company would love to have their content reach 30 percent of college students every month. Kirk was absolutely a success story in his world, a brilliant political activist and a talented communicator, as I wrote back in March. His murder is a tragedy, an affront to our democratic values, and another ugly sign that political violence is becoming commonplace.

But this poll from Generation Lab reveals that even among his base—college students, the Americans who knew him best—Kirk was a deeply unpopular figure. It does make you wonder how he made it into the bright lights of Yankee Stadium last weekend—and how much Americans will tolerate Trump’s promises of vengeance in his name.

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