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The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
Covid-19 has shook the foundations of many social institutions. As the 2020 election careens towards us, political scientists are attempting to understand how Covid-19 will affect voter turnout. The college student vote is of particular concern.
The student population has been chronically underrepresented in the U.S. vote. Historically, there has been a 15-point gap between the youth vote and other age demographics. Low turnout among youth has been sourced to a combination of their recently acquired eligibility, alternative civic participation methods, and the opportunity cost of being a new voter.
The low turnout among youth is particularly concerning for Democrat politicians, given that university students self-identify as Democrats at a 12+ point margin compared to Republicans. As a college student, I am surprised by this statistic: I expected the divide to be even greater. One factor to consider in this discrepancy between my experience and the statistic is that over 75% of college conservatives do not feel comfortable sharing their political leanings due to fear of retaliation.
However, Democrats can be cheered by the 2018 results. It seems that the youth population is voting in increasing proportions, with overwhelming support for the Democratic Party. In a recent USG interview with the Vote 100 team, a Princeton University get-out-the vote initiative, there has been over a 38 point jump in the percentage of University students voting from the 2014 election to the 2018 election.
Princeton has greatly surpassed the voting percentage increase of many peer institutions. Overall, in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, college students doubled their voting turnout from the 2014 to 2018 midterm elections, as measured across 1000 U.S. campuses.
This may be due to grassroots style registration drives. For example, sports teams competed against each other to see who could garner the most registered members. A Princeton freshman, Lexi Hiltunen, stated that Women’s Soccer has registered 100% of the team. One could worry that such vote gathering initiatives may have similar detrimental partisan effects to ballot harvesting, but for Women’s Soccer that is not the case. Hiltunen says that they “receive reminders to vote” from the team and coaches, and that teammates are “never… put down for thinking one way or another.” This is at odds with the aforementioned statistic that 75% of conservative college students are not comfortable sharing their political stances. Perhaps the Princeton Women’s Soccer team offers a more politically inclusive space than other venues.
This increased student turnout meant that students could have an outsized impact in deciding the fate of close races. As far as specific evidence on the impact this increased youth participation has had, in the 2018 midterm election, 22 competitively rated districts had a “high proportion” of college students. College students may have also played a key role in Tony Evers (D) close win over the indefatigable incumbent Scott Walker (R) in Wisconsin. Evers only beat Walker by over 1 percentage point, 30,576 votes in total. Large schools can bring in thousands of students from around the country, whose political leanings may not align with the local resident’ views. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison for example, 49% of their class of 2019 came from out of state. Out of state students can still register in-state to vote. For reference, there are over 330,000 college students residing in Wisconsin. The majority of college students in Wisconsin (over 100,000) are located in districts that Evers won, with Evers capturing all counties with a sizable number of university students by the same margins that Walker won the counties with no university student population. It is possible that that election was decided by students who were not even from Wisconsin.
Republicans should not immediately be dismayed, because some of these contested districts decided by the college vote may revert this cycle. Since many colleges moved to an online format for the fall, there are less student polling places and fewer confrontations with people attempting to register college students. Some of the most accurate pollsters from 2016 and 2018 believe that the college student turnout may be reduced by millions this election cycle. If this is true, with many pollsters not considering the potentially lower youth turnout than 2018, then their results may be quite skewed in favor of Democrat candidates, hoping for the youth vote that doesn’t turn up.
On Princeton’s campus, that is not going to be the case. The Vote 100 staff stated in a private USG meeting that they fully expect to beat out peer institutions in voter registration and exceed 2018 levels of voter engagement. Additionally, some polls of college students show that nearly 7 in 10 are planning on voting this election cycle, which would be a record setting turnout.
Representative Elissa Slotkin (D) of Michigan’s House race is one example of how Covid-19’s effect on the college student vote may change elections. In 2018, she beat a Republican incumbent by a mere 13,000 votes. She estimated that due to students being off campus, she is nearly 50,000 votes short of where she was last year.
It seems that indeed, the college vote is becoming increasingly relevant to tightly contested races. Republicans need to reach out to younger voters and reduce the democratic advantage if they want to continue to hang on to swing districts.
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