The upcoming election will likely be less about changing voters’ minds and more about rousing the faithful and getting them to the polls.
America’s students, who according to an analysis by Tufts University helped elect Biden in key swing states in 2020, could prove to be pivotal in this regard, both as targets and as foot soldiers in the party’s get-out-the-vote drives.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit currently moving through Wisconsin courts appears to provide a case study for how these campaigns translate into election wins for the Democratic Party.
In February, Vice President Kamala Harris highlighted that the government is paying college students to register voters.
“We have been doing work to promote voter participation for students. And, for example we … now allow students to get paid through Federal Work Study to register people and to be nonpartisan poll workers,” she said.
Ms. Harris said the Biden administration has been able “to charge federal agencies with doing the work that they rightly can do to inform the American people of their right to vote.”
Paying students to canvass is the latest component of an initiative originated under former President Barack Obama to increase student voting. Initially this was carried out in conjunction with private nonprofit organizations such as Civic Nation.
Founded with the support of President Obama, his wife, and Joe Biden in 2015, and led by former Obama staffers, Civic Nation now boasts a partnership with 1,700 colleges and universities and a reported budget of more than $16 million in 2020.
Its stated goal is “fighting for gender equity, social justice, and more,” and it leads the “All In Campus Democracy Challenge” that engages with university administrators to get them to sign up student voters.
All In runs school get-out-the-vote competitions in all 50 states. According to its website, it has partnered with 994 institutions and signed up more than 10 million students. As part of the “challenge,” schools agree to share student voting data.
Civic Nation receives much of its funding from a network of progressive charitable funds managed by Arabella Advisors, which oversees a network of nonprofit vehicles that finance left-wing political campaigns.
Under the Biden administration, however, the student get-out-the-vote campaign is now being run with federal funds, spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Executive Order Backed by Federal Funds
President Biden’s Executive Order 14019 compels all government agencies to take part in a nationwide effort to register voters and includes a program by the Department of Education (DOE) that pressures educational institutions to demonstrate that they have signed up students to vote.
Following the issuance of EO14019, the DOE sent schools a “Dear Colleague Letter” to “remind institutions of higher education of the federal requirements regarding voting that are tied to participation in federal student aid programs.”
The letter, according to the DOE, also clarifies when Federal Work Study dollars can be used “for nonpartisan civic engagement work.”
According to a 2022 report by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), “youth ages 18–29 are the only age group in which a strong majority supported Democrats.”
Up until 2002, the youth vote was evenly split between the two parties, the report stated, but since that time young people have shifted sharply in favor Democrats by what is now a 28-point margin. The get-out-the-vote campaigns do not target all young voters equally, however. Instead, they focus their efforts on the most reliable Democrat voters—those who attend college.
A 2020 survey by Pew Research found that the single largest voter gap in favor of Democrats was white college-educated women, of whom 62 percent voted Democrat versus 34 percent who voted Republican. Conversely, non-college white men favored the Republican Party by a margin of 32 points, with 62 percent for Republicans and 30 percent for Democrats.
“Democrats increasingly dominate in party identification among white college graduates,” the report states. “Republicans increasingly dominate in party affiliation among white non-college voters.”
Students Vote Like Their Teachers
A 2020 report by the National Association of Scholars found that Democrat-registered professors outnumbered Republican-registered professors by a ratio of 10-to-1, a gap that has widened from 4.5-to-1 in 1999.
“Research since World War II has consistently found overwhelmingly left-oriented political attitudes and ideological self-identification among college and university faculty,” the Association states. “It has also found overwhelming support for the Democratic Party.”
The other factor that makes the college vote so attractive to Democrats is the location of college students in key swing states, where a few thousand votes can deliver a win in a tight election. For this reason it may not be coincidental that the youth turnout rate has been much higher in swing states than non-swing states.
The CIRCLE report found that among the highest states for youth voter turnout were Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nevada, and Georgia. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, for example, 36.5 percent and 31.7 percent of residents under the age of 29 voted in 2022.
This contrasts sharply with neighboring non swing states such as West Virginia (14.2 percent), Delaware (18.7 percent), New Jersey (20.6 percent), Ohio (21.6 percent), Connecticut (21.4 percent), New York (20.7 percent), and Massachusetts (18.5 percent). Oregon, a reliable blue state, bucked this trend with 35.5 percent youth turnout.
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