Back in April, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had an urgent message following his party’s devastating loss in an off-year state Supreme Court contest that flipped its control to Democrats: Republicans are screwed if they don't find a way to quash college voters.
"Dane County cast more ballots in the race for the Supreme Court than the largest county in the state—Milwaukee County," Scott explained, noting that Dane County is home to some 50,000 University of Wisconsin students. "82% of votes went for the radical," Walker added, referencing liberal leaning pro-choice Judge Janet Protasiewicz.
Protasiewicz notched an eye-popping 11-point win over her conservative anti-abortion rival in a 50-50 state.
"Younger voters are the issue," Walker tweeted, failing to entertain the idea that maybe—just maybe—Republicans are wildly out of step with Americans in their crusade to ban abortions entirely at the state and federal levels. "It comes from years of radical indoctrination - on campus, in school, with social media, & throughout culture."
Walker warned that Republicans would "never" win a battleground state again if they didn't turn back the trend. The problem wasn't just that Dane County voters had so disproportionately opted for the liberal candidate: it was that they had turned out at such extraordinary levels they had upended the math for Republicans.
“This is a really big deal,” Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in Wisconsin, told Politico in a deeply reported piece by Charlie Mahtesian and Madi Alexander. “What Democrats are doing in Dane County is truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.” The article notes how Democrats are turning college campuses into electoral juggernauts that have already tipped the balance toward Democrats in key states and threatening to shut out Republicans in a handful more.
In Michigan, for instance, where Democrats are reshaping public policy from the left, University of Michigan-based Washtenaw County went for Joe Biden in 2020 by some 46 points, 72% - 26%, or nearly 101,000 votes. Hillary Clinton also decisively won Washtenaw in 2016, but she only netted 82,400 votes. If Clinton had bested Trump by the same vote margin as Biden, she would have more than made up the 10,704 votes by which she lost the state.
Dane and Washtenaw counties aren’t outliers. Democrats are seeing the same trends in college-town counties across the country.
Of the 171 cities and counties identified as "college towns" by the American Communities Project, 2 in 3 have grown more Democratic and 38 have flipped from red to blue, according to a Politico analysis of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
Colorado is one of the states that have benefited from this shift. “Since 2008, when Larimer [County] first flipped from red to blue, [Colorado] has firmly been in the Democratic column,” reported Politico. “Between the 2000 and 2020 presidential elections, in Larimer [home of Colorado State University,] 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.”
So where might this trend help Democrats in the upcoming election cycles? The article identifies Gallatin County, Montana, home to Bozeman and Montana State University, and Buncombe County, North Carolina, where UNC-Asheville is located.
In Montana, Democrats are hoping Sen. Jon Tester can hang on to his seat to help retain their majority in a very challenging state. Gallatin County is critical for Tester to pull it off.
And while North Carolina isn't fielding a U.S. Senate race, Biden lost the state by just a single point in 2020. Flipping any single state from red to blue in the presidential contest would give Democrats breathing room in a contest that might just be a rematch between Biden and Trump. And Democrats need all the breathing room they can find.
As Markos Moulitsas wrote Friday, “Flip 43,000 votes in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, and we have a 269-269 Electoral College tie and Trump wins with the majority of House state delegations. Flip another 33,000 votes in Nevada, or 21,000 in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, and Trump wins outright.”
But the “college town” effect combined with changing demographics of the electorate to be both younger and more diverse, offer real hope. Democratic North Carolina state Sen. Julie Mayfield drew a comparison between what transpired in Dane County earlier this year and what could happen in Buncombe County.
“Everything the Republicans are doing now in this legislative session will come back to haunt them in places like Buncombe County,” Mayfield told Politico, homing in the 12-week abortion ban Republicans rammed through the legislature, among other autocratic policies, “just like what happened in Wisconsin.”
