[Growing population in America’s highly educated enclaves has
led to huge gains for the Democratic Party. And Republicans are
scrambling for answers.]
[[link removed]]

HOW COLLEGE TOWNS ARE DECIMATING THE GOP  
[[link removed]]


 

Charlie Mahtesian and Madi Alexander
July 21, 2023
Politico
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Growing population in America’s highly educated enclaves has led
to huge gains for the Democratic Party. And Republicans are scrambling
for answers. _

,

 

MADISON, WISCONSIN — Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically
low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the
state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in
record-breaking numbers.

No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s
second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a
progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the
state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something
else. Turnout in Dane was higher than anywhere else in the state. And
the Democratic margin of victory that delivered control of the
nonpartisan court to liberals was even more lopsided than usual —
and bigger than in any of the state’s other 71 counties.

The margin was so big that it changed the state’s electoral formula.
Under the state’s traditional political math, Milwaukee and Dane —
Wisconsin’s two Democratic strongholds — are counterbalanced by
the populous Republican suburbs surrounding Milwaukee. The rest of the
state typically delivers the decisive margin in statewide races. The
Supreme Court results blew up that model. Dane County alone is now so
dominant that it overwhelms the Milwaukee suburbs (which have begun
trending leftward anyway
[[link removed]]).
In effect, Dane has become a Republican-killing Death Star.

“This is a really big deal,” said Mark Graul, a Republican
strategist who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in
Wisconsin. “What Democrats are doing in Dane County is truly making
it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.”

In isolation, it’s a worrisome development
[[link removed]] for
Republicans. Unfortunately for the larger GOP, it’s not happening in
isolation.

In state after state, fast-growing, traditionally liberal college
counties like Dane are flexing their muscles, generating higher
turnout and ever greater Democratic margins. They’ve already played
a pivotal role in turning several red states blue — and they could
play an equally decisive role in key swing states next year.

One of those states is Michigan. Twenty years ago, the University of
Michigan’s Washtenaw County gave Democrat Al Gore what seemed to be
a massive victory — a 60-36 percent win over Republican George W.
Bush, marked by a margin of victory of roughly 34,000 votes. Yet that
was peanuts compared to what happened in 2020. Biden won Washtenaw by
close to 50 percentage points, with a winning margin of about 101,000
votes. If Washtenaw had produced the same vote margin four years
earlier, Hillary Clinton would have won Michigan, a state that played
a prominent role in putting Donald Trump in the White House.

Name the flagship university — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa,
Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others — and the
story tends to be the same. If the surrounding county was a reliable
source of Democratic votes in the past, it’s a landslide county now.
There are exceptions to the rule, particularly in the states with the
most conservative voting habits. But even in reliably red places like
South Carolina, Montana and Texas, you’ll find at least one
college-oriented county producing ever larger Democratic margins.

The American Communities Project
[[link removed]], which has developed a typology
of counties, designates 171 independent cities and counties as
“college towns.” In a combined social science/journalism effort
based at the Michigan State University School of Journalism
[[link removed]], the ACP
uses three dozen different demographic and economic variables in its
analysis such as population density, employment, bachelor’s degrees,
household income, percent enrolled in college, rate of religious
adherence and racial and ethnic composition.

Of those 171 places, 38 have flipped from red to blue since the 2000
presidential election. Just seven flipped the other way, from blue to
red, and typically by smaller margins. Democrats grew their percentage
point margins in 117 counties, while 54 counties grew redder. By raw
votes, the difference was just as stark: The counties that grew bluer
increased their margins by an average of 16,253, while Republicans
increased their margins by an average of 4,063.

Back in 2000, the places identified as college towns by ACP voted 48
percent to 47 percent in favor of Al Gore. In the last presidential
election, the 25 million who live in those places voted for Joe Biden,
54 percent to 44 percent.

Many populous urban counties that are home to large universities
don’t even make the ACP’s “college towns” list because their
economic and demographic profiles differentiate them from more
traditional college counties. Among the missing are places like the
University of Texas’ Travis County, where the Democratic margin of
victory grew by 290,000 votes since 2000, and the University of New
Mexico’s Bernalillo County, where the margin grew by 73,000 votes.
The University of Minnesota’s Hennepin County has become bluer by
245,000 votes.

North Carolina offers a revealing snapshot of a state whose college
towns have altered its electoral landscape. Five of the state’s nine
counties that contain so-called college towns have gone blue since
voting for George W. Bush in 2000. Back then, the nine counties
together netted roughly 12,000 votes for Bush, who carried the state
by nearly 13 percent. Twenty years later, those numbers had broken
dramatically in the opposite direction — Biden netted 222,000 votes
from those counties. He still lost the state, but the margin was
barely more than 1 percent.

There’s no single factor driving the college town trend. In some
places, it’s an influx of left-leaning, highly educated newcomers,
drawn to growing, cutting-edge industries advanced by university
research or the vibrant quality of life. In others, it’s rising
levels of student engagement on growing campuses. Often, it’s a
combination of both.

What’s clear is that these places are altering the political
calculus across the national map. Combine university counties with
heavily Democratic big cities and increasingly blue suburbs
[[link removed]],
and pretty soon you have a state that’s out of the Republican
Party’s reach.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the GOP, which is responding in
ways that reach beyond traditional tensions between conservative
lawmakers and liberal universities — such as targeting students’
voting rights, creating additional barriers to voter access or
redrawing maps to dilute or limit the power of college communities.
But there are limits to what those efforts can accomplish. They
aren’t geared toward growing the GOP vote, merely toward suppressing
Democratic totals. And they aren’t addressing the structural
problems created by the rising tide of college-town votes — students
are only part of the overall phenomenon.

“The data sure seem to suggest younger voters are leaning much more
Democratic in recent years and, perhaps more concerning for the
Republicans, the GOP seems to be struggling more broadly with
college-educated voters. In the longer term, that may mean these
voters may stay Democratic — or at least stay Democratic longer than
they might otherwise,” says Dante Chinni, director of the ACP. “In
addition, polls show Republicans are increasingly distrustful of
higher education institutions. That probably doesn’t help in the
longer term either.”

Inside Kevin McCarthy’s secret promise to expunge Trump’s record
[[link removed]]

‘The Ecosystem is Churning and Churning Right Now’

FOR MUCH OF the 20th century, the area surrounding Fort Collins,
home to Colorado State University, was a Republican stronghold.
Larimer County, with its farming and ranching heritage, was the kind
of place that voted Democratic only under extreme circumstances —
like during the landslide elections of 1936 and 1964, or in 1992, when
the presidential vote was splintered three ways. Today, however, after
Biden won Larimer in a 15-point blowout in 2020, the real question:
Just how deep is the county’s shade of blue?

Larimer’s political evolution is in large part a story of how the
economic, cultural and political forces radiating out of university
communities can alter the political complexion of a red county — and
ultimately a state.

Since 2000, Colorado State has experienced an extended growth spurt
that has seen enrollment expand by more than 7,300 students. The
number of tenured faculty has grown, the number of university
employees has grown and the campus itself has seen $1.6 billion in
capital investment in everything from residence halls to research
centers to a new campus stadium.

More college students and more faculty tend to be a recipe for more
Democratic votes. But there are also larger forces at work. Larimer
County grew by 19 percent in the 2000s, and then by another 20 percent
in the most recent census, with over 100,000 new residents arriving
over the past two decades. That surge of newcomers flocked to the area
for its high quality of life and dynamic economy — and CSU plays a
role in sustaining both. Aside from providing Fort Collins with
big-city amenities, it partners and collaborates with nearby
industries and the major federal laboratories and research centers
that are clustered in Colorado.

The school — with its expertise in vector-borne infectious disease,
veterinary medicine, atmospheric science, clean energy technologies
and environmental science — aggressively commercializes its
research. A private, not-for-profit corporation, legally separate from
the university, exists solely to spin technology out of the university
and into the private sector. As a result, more than 60 startups based
on CSU intellectual property have launched over the past two decades
[[link removed]].

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[[link removed]]

“As the university grows and we bring in superstar faculty and
researchers as our research portfolio and whatnot continues to
grow,” says Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State, “then
they’re expanding and creating new technologies, new spinoff
companies out into the community that’s bringing in more jobs and
people and diversity, and so that’s the ecosystem that is churning
and churning right now.”

While the newcomers — many of whom have relocated to the Fort
Collins-Loveland metro area from elsewhere in Colorado, but also
disproportionately from states like California, Arizona and Texas,
according to Census data — have helped Democrats achieve parity with
Republicans in terms of voter registration, the bigger story in
Larimer County is the explosive growth in the number of unaffiliated
voters. Between 2011 and 2023, the number of unaffiliated voters grew
by close to 200 percent. Today, it is the most dominant voting bloc in
the county — close to half of all voters in the county are now
registered as unaffiliated — and they are casting votes for
Democratic candidates.

“Colorado, like the West, [has an] independent streak, a lot of
unaffiliated voters,” says John Kefalas, a CSU graduate who also
served as an adjunct faculty member and in 2018 became the first
Democratic county commissioner since 2004. “But those unaffiliated
voters, based on our experience, tend to lean toward Democratic or
tend to lean toward more moderate or progressive.”

The national realignment of politics along cultural and educational
lines is also playing a role. Larimer ranks as one of the most
educated counties in Colorado, which itself ranks among the most
educated states in the nation. Even if newcomers aren’t registering
as Democrats, many possess the traits associated with a Democratic
voter profile — environmentally conscious, closely attuned to
climate change issues, white and college-educated. As Larimer and the
other high-population areas along the state’s urbanized Front Range
corridor have drifted leftward, so has the state: Democrats now hold
all the levers of power in Colorado, including the governor’s office
and the legislature.

The state’s two biggest college counties have led the way. Back in
2000, Colorado was a red state that had voted for Republican nominees
in eight of the preceding nine presidential elections. But since 2008,
when Larimer first flipped from red to blue, the state has firmly been
in the Democratic column. Between the 2000 and 2020 presidential
elections, in Larimer and Boulder County, home to the University of
Colorado, the Democratic vote grew by 169,000 votes. The Republican
vote, by comparison, grew by just 21,000 votes.

Virginia has followed a similar path. The American Communities Project
lists 18 counties and independent cities as college towns there; nine
of them have flipped from red to blue over the past 20 years. Just
one, the city of Norton in the southwest corner near to UVA’s
College at Wise [[link removed]], has flipped the other way
— by less than 1,000 votes. Virginia’s governor is Republican, but
like Colorado, the state voted Democratic in 2008’s presidential
race and hasn’t looked back.

‘A Place Where People Tend to Find Like-Minded People’

WITH THEIR REPUTATION for livability, college towns exert a magnetic
pull that draws new residents from other states. Often, these new
residents are fleeing more conservative locations, and their arrival
has the effect of intensifying the liberal bent of the surrounding
area.

Asheville in western North Carolina is one of those places
[[link removed]].

Though considerably smaller than some of the other college towns in
the state, Asheville’s Buncombe County has added just over 66,000
residents since 2000
[[link removed]] and grown a robust 12
percent in just the last decade. Over that period, those new residents
have played a key role in Buncombe’s evolution from a red county
that gave George W. Bush a comfortable 54-45 victory to a blue
stronghold Biden won by a 21-point margin.

Though it’s listed as a college town by the ACP — it’s home to
roughly 3,000 University of North Carolina Asheville students — few
here think of it that way. Asheville is a popular tourist town, a hub
for arts and music and a counterculture haven in the scenic Blue Ridge
mountains, and it’s the new permanent residents who are having the
impact on the county’s political complexion.

“Asheville is known as a bring-your-own-job city,” explains Nick
Hinton, a local real estate agent who’s originally from Los Angeles
and moved to Asheville a decade ago. “We’re not known to have a
plethora of career-type jobs available. Those types who either have a
job or can telecommute or feel like opening up a business, that’s
who seems to be drawn to this area.”

Many are millennials — the baby boomers who come here to retire,
Hinton notes, tend to be less politically motivated. A healthy portion
move here from elsewhere in the state but Florida, Illinois and the
Northeast are also sending a steady stream.

Jeff Rose, the county’s Democratic Party chair, notes that many of
the newcomers are “climate refugees” highly attuned to
environmental and sustainability issues. “I’ve met numerous people
who moved here from California to try and get away from constant
forest fires and things like that,” he says. “If you’re
ideologically interested in the issues that arise from climate change,
there’s a lot of people here that are doing that kind of work,
whether it’s groups that do river clean-ups, groups that are
focusing around the Collider, which is an innovation center for
sustainability [[link removed]] — there’s a number of
solar companies and things like that in the area. …This is a place
where people tend to find like-minded people.”

Buncombe’s intensifying leftward shift has a strong self-sorting
element to it and it’s not alone nationally.

“We’ve seen this pattern in the last 10 years across the
country,” says Democratic state Rep. Lindsey Prather, a UNCA
graduate who represents an Asheville-area district. “People are
increasingly looking at the partisan leaning of a community when
they’re deciding where to move. It used to be, well, I got a job
there or my family’s there.”

Just as in Colorado’s Larimer County, the newcomers are registering
as unaffiliated but largely voting Democratic. Today, a plurality of
Buncombe County voters are registered as unaffiliated — and there
are nearly twice as many unaffiliated as there are registered
Republicans. Yet the effect has been to amplify Asheville’s
traditionally liberal politics and push the surrounding county
leftward. In 2020, Asheville elected a progressive, all-female city
council. Last year, the Buncombe County commission ousted its lone
remaining Republican.

So far, the growing Democratic margins in Buncombe, the Research
Triangle — which is home to three major research universities —
and other college counties haven’t been enough to turn the state
blue, though many Democrats continue to view North Carolina as close
to a tipping point. Biden came close in 2020, losing by just over a
percentage point, but Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in North
Carolina since 2008 and have won a presidential race just once here
since the 1970s.

“Everything the Republicans are doing now in this legislative
session will come back to haunt them in places like Buncombe
County,” says Democratic state Sen. Julie Mayfield, referring to a
slew of contentious measures including a 12-week abortion ban and
education policies that would make it easier to prosecute librarians
and school employees for displaying materials deemed harmful to
minors, pursued by the GOP majority in Raleigh, “just like what
happened in Wisconsin.”

The college town phenomenon is so strong it has Democrats daring to
wonder if they might one day flip a solidly red state such as Montana.
It seems implausible given the shellacking that Democrats endured in
2020 when the party suffered a devastating across-the-board defeat,
leaving just one statewide Democratic official in office, Sen. Jon
Tester.

But the state has a long history of ticket-splitting — Democrats
held the governorship from 2005 through 2021; in 2008, Barack Obama
came within 12,000 votes of winning here. And if you look at the
growth in Montana’s two big college counties, Missoula, which is
home to the University of Montana, and Gallatin, which is home to
Montana State University, you see what gives Democrats hope.

Gallatin, which serves as a gateway to Yellowstone National Park, has
nearly doubled in population since 2000, fueled by rising enrollment
at the university, out-of-state migrants and the emergence of Bozeman
as a technology hub. And over that period, it’s gone from a 59-31
Bush county to a 52-45 Biden county. Between Gallatin’s boom and
Missoula’s more modest growth, the two Democratic beachheads now
account for roughly a quarter of the statewide vote — up from about
20 percent in 2000. Many of the new migrants to Bozeman are
Californians. But they are also moving in from the Denver suburbs and
from big cities across the West — Seattle’s King County,
Phoenix’s Maricopa County and Las Vegas’ Clark County.

For Democrats, Gallatin’s growth is subject to the law of unintended
consequences. While Bozeman still retains its mountain college town
feel, it’s taken on the trappings of an Aspen or a Park City.
Housing prices have skyrocketed — the median sales price for a
single-family home doubled from $400,000 to $800,000 just since 2017
[[link removed]].
It’s now experiencing a housing affordability crisis, amplified by a
post-pandemic surge in demand thanks to an influx of wealthy
out-of-staters, many of whom lean conservative, says Democratic state
Rep. Kelly Kortum.

“I’ll never own a house in Bozeman. Not unless I get some kind of
crazy promotion,” Kortum laments. “The housing prices have tripled
in the last 10 years. The pandemic exacerbated that by driving a lot
of fresh retirees to retire in Montana.”

As Bozeman grapples with its housing crisis, Flathead County, a
Republican stronghold near Glacier National Park, has drawn an influx
of more conservative newcomers in recent years, recently overtaking
Gallatin as the fastest-growing county in Montana. While there’s no
significant college presence in the county, at the rate it’s growing
it could surpass Missoula and Gallatin counties in population by the
end of the decade.

“Bozeman is blue,” says Julia Shaida, the Gallatin County
Democratic Party chair, “if you can afford to live here.”

‘Ever Greater Turnout, Producing Ever Greater Margins’

GROWTH IS POLITICALLY meaningless if new residents don’t become
voters. In college towns, the get-out-the-vote efforts have converted
newcomers into electoral muscle.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the fastest-growing county in
Wisconsin.

Between 2010 and 2020, Dane County grew by 15 percent, adding close to
75,000 new residents. It didn’t take long for the political
implications of that surge to become apparent. Between 2016 and 2020,
the county’s raw vote grew by 11 percent and Democratic performance
began ratcheting upward in statewide races. Even with the GOP’s
pronounced recent gains in rural Wisconsin, if Dane County voters
continue to turn out at exceptionally high levels and continue to
deliver landslide Democratic margins, Wisconsin’s days of being a
swing state are numbered.

“The superpower of Dane County is ever greater population with ever
greater turnout producing ever greater margins,” says Ben Wikler,
the chair of the state Democratic Party. “Dane County turnout helps
create a buffer against potential growth in Republican turnout
elsewhere in the state.”

And Dane County has one of the nation’s most effective local party
organizations. “It’s not a very sexy story. It’s a lot of hard
work that we’re doing over a long period of time,” says Alexia
Sabor, Dane County Democratic chair.

“The county party helps to organize a network of 20 neighborhood
grassroots action teams. We fund them, we provide them with offices
during election seasons, we give them money for websites, Mailchimp
[an email marketing platform], volunteer recruitment events, volunteer
thank-you events, whatever supplies they need — paper, printers,
lighting — to run their team,” Sabor says. “We’re doing this
every month of the year, whether or not there’s a big election
coming. And we’ve been doing it for the last five years.”

In an interview at a Madison pub, Sabor radiates focus and intensity
as she talks about the nuts and bolts of campaigning. She and other
local party members fully recognize statewide elections now hinge on a
turbocharged local performance, one that delivers votes not only from
the deep blue precincts of Madison but also from the smaller and more
politically competitive suburban cities, towns and villages that
surround it.

She notes matter-of-factly that other county Democratic parties had
spring galas several weeks before the spring court election. No one in
Dane was getting distracted by or dressed up for a fancy fundraising
dinner.

“There’s no way my board members, if I would even suggest it,
which I wouldn’t, would ever have gone for that because that would
be sucking away our focus from the only thing that matters, which is
getting people to the polls,” Sabor says. “Doors. Voters. It’s
all that matters. It. Is. All. That. Matters. That is my one job, to
win elections and get Democrats elected up and down the ballot.”

But Dane has one more sophisticated turnout machine that is
increasingly common in college towns: students themselves. More
politically active here than most other college towns, students have
been an important voting bloc for years. From Bascom Hill, the
historic core of the UW-Madison campus, there is a direct line of
sight to the state capitol at the opposite end of State Street. That
proximity to power gives their work a sense of immediacy and
relevance.

But it’s not just in Madison where students are mobilizing in
greater numbers — it’s in most of the counties where there is a
university or a UW campus. In the 2022 midterm elections, 49 percent
of those aged 18-24 voted
[[link removed]] in
Wisconsin — the highest figure among all 50 states and double the
national average.

Wisconsin students of this generation came of age during a period that
has felt like partisan wartime defined by mass shootings, climate
change, two presidential impeachments, Covid and Jan. 6. Then, last
year, _Roe vs. Wade_ was overturned. They understand that every vote
counts because they have seen razor-thin margins decide many statewide
elections. Trump carried the state in 2016 by less than a percentage
point — just 23,000 votes. Four years later, when Biden flipped the
state, the margin was even smaller. Recounts and audits followed,
underscoring the importance of just a few strategically cast votes.

The spring court election saw the youth vote at its most muscular. One
of those students was Maggie Keuler, a 21-year-old senior political
science major from eastern Wisconsin. On Election Day, Keuler was out
of her apartment by 6:30 a.m. to place 4-by-8-foot campaign signs
across the campus before the polls opened at 7 a.m. She ditched her
classes to spend the day at a voting information table on Library
Mall, the open space that is ideal for wrangling students as they walk
to and from classes.

“It was school later, election now,” says Keuler, whose work as
president of the College Democrats and also as a youth organizing
director for the state party amounted to something close to a
full-time job, including three door-knocking shifts a day on weekends.
“I came here to do this kind of work. Part of the reason I chose
Wisconsin was so I could continue to be a part of these efforts and
was not going to let school get in the way of that.”

Keuler’s commitment was extreme, but it wasn’t entirely unusual.
Emily Treffert, a rising sophomore from Milwaukee County, also says
she came to Madison for the politics. She got involved with midterm
election organizing efforts during her first semester at college.
Then, during her second semester, she joined Project 72, one of a
handful of different liberal groups that organized on college campuses
across the state.

Project 72’s efforts ranged from the traditional to the outlandish.
There was door-knocking, but there were also Thursday night forays to
canvass students waiting in lines to get in campus watering holes.
Treffert, who at different times wore cow costumes and cowboy hats to
get attention, notes that traditional methods of reaching college
students haven’t really worked. “We have to create new solutions,
new ideas to move the college students because of how impactful their
vote is,” she says.

All of that organizing activity led to a huge turnout in the spring
elections, especially at the polling locations on college
campuses. According to a post-election _Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel _analysis
[[link removed]],
the highest turnout of the 77 wards in the city of Eau Claire came
from the ward that includes a number of UW-Eau Claire dorms.

“The results on campus were astounding,” Keuler says, referring to
the vote in Madison. “The turnout was incredible.”

‘Roll Out of Bed, Vote and Go Back to Bed’

THE OVERWHELMINGLY Democratic nature of the student vote, both in
Wisconsin and elsewhere, has left Republicans struggling to respond.
Just weeks after the Wisconsin court election, Cleta Mitchell, a
veteran GOP election lawyer, gave a presentation at a Republican
National Committee donor retreat calling for measures that would limit
voting on college campuses
[[link removed]].

“What are these college campus locations?” she asked, according to
the audio obtained by the _Washington Post_. “What is this young
people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next
to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote and go
back to bed.”

According to the report, Mitchell focused on campus voting in five
states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin. Each of
them features large counties with significant university communities
that have flipped from red to blue or are churning out ever bigger
Democratic margins.

Among them: the University of Arizona’s Pima County, which has seen
Democratic presidential margins grow by nearly 75,000 votes since
2000. In Nevada, Reno’s fast-growing Washoe County — home to the
University of Nevada and its 20,000 students — flipped blue in 2008
after decades of backing Republican presidential candidates and
hasn’t returned to the GOP fold since. The University of Georgia’s
Clarke County has seen its Democratic presidential margins roughly
double since 2012. It’s considerably smaller in population than
either Pima or Washoe counties, so Biden’s winning margin in 2020
was a mere 22,000 votes. But that’s in a state so closely divided
that it was decided by just 11,000.

In the aftermath of the Wisconsin election, former Republican Gov.
Scott Walker acknowledged the important role students played in
determining the outcome but viewed the problem facing the party in a
cultural context.

“Young voters are the issue,” he wrote on Twitter
[[link removed]]. “It
comes from years of radical indoctrination — on campus, in school,
with social media, & throughout culture. We have to counter it or
conservatives will never win battleground states again.”

Walker, who is president of Young America’s Foundation, a
conservative youth organization, has said his group is not seeking to
change the ground rules for voting. Rather, he pointed out that
conservatives have been “overlooking ways to communicate to young
people sooner than a month or two before the election
[[link removed]].”

Walker’s criticisms are widely shared on the right, including by
Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has sought to crack
down on liberal curriculums and diversity, equity and inclusion
initiatives.

In Wisconsin, despite a record-high budget surplus, Republican
lawmakers declined to fully fund the University of Wisconsin
System’s budget request and voted in June to cut its budget by $32
million — the amount GOP leaders estimated would be spent on DEI
programs at the system’s 13 universities.

At the Wisconsin GOP state convention in mid-June, the college
mobilization issue remained on the mind of activists. But a
resolution calling on lawmakers to require college students to vote
absentee in their home communities
[[link removed]] instead
of on campus was tabled, in part because of the opposition of
Republican county chairs in Milwaukee and Dane County.

“Why on Earth would we send a message to the students that we
don’t want them to vote our way?” Milwaukee County GOP Chair
Hilario Deleon told his fellow party activists. “Do not give the
Democrats ammunition, give them competition.”

* elections
[[link removed]]
* students
[[link removed]]
* college students
[[link removed]]
* Democratic Party
[[link removed]]
* Republican Party
[[link removed]]

*
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*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

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