Are College Towns Becoming ‘Republican-Killing Death Stars,’ OF VOTES?
Yes.
We borrowed that phrase from a Politico piece you’re going to want to read, about how Republicans are shitting their already shitted panties over college towns and how they’re suddenly voting their asses off.
A while back, we had a thing about a secret talk evil Republican coup lawyer piece of shit Cleta Mitchell had given to a bunch of GOP operatives and RNC donors in Nashville, which was remarkably laser-focused on laying out strategies to keep college students and other young people from voting. We’re sure she considered doing a talk on Republicans governing in ways normal people like, or making life better for people who aren’t old white racists whose already rotting bodies are going to be maggot food within a couple election cycles. But she didn’t do those. Instead she did the “We don’t like how everybody else votes, so let’s not let them vote” talk. (Republicans have had it memorized for decades, it’s easy.)
A-Hole Trump Coup Lawyer Sick Of Gross Youngs Voting, What If We Just Made That Totally Impossible?
Old-ass white Cleta Mitchell was particularly exercised about campus voting in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Virginia, and Georgia, noting that all five states "are home to enormous public universities with large in-state student populations." Guess how all those states voted in the 2020 election?
Now let’s flip over to that article from the Politico magazine, which begins with an examination of how what Democrats have done with turnout in Dane County — AKA Madison AKA the University of Wisconsin at Madison — has completely murdered Republicans in areas where they usually expect to balance out the count, like the Milwaukee suburbs, which Politico notes are getting bluer anyway.
Those blowout elections over the Wisconsin Supreme Court and abortion this year? Madison/Dane County.
“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.”
Fuck yeah, and may the fascists never win again. Wisconsin could become a democracy yet!
Politico’s reporting says it’s not just Wisconsin, but rather a hell of a lot of college towns, in all the places. (In many red states, these towns are often known as “the only places in the state worth that are worth visiting.”)
It talks about how many of these college town county margins used to be big, but now they are overwhelmingly ridiculous. One example they give is Washtenaw County, Michigan, AKA Ann Arbor, AKA the University of Michigan. In the 2000 election, it went 60-36 for Al Gore, or by about 34,000 votes. In 2020, it went approximately 72-26, and Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by over 100,000 votes. (It also notes that if that margin had been that large in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won Michigan. Let’s not make those mistakes again.)
Where else are these towns, according to Politico? Oh, just pretty much everywhere.
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.
And if those landslide counties are also turnout machines, then, well, that’s a lot of blue states getting ROYAL AQUA TOILET BOWL CLEANER NAVY BLUE — very popular Sherwin Williams color — and a heck of a few other states that could become purple maybe ahead of schedule.
The article goes more nitty gritty, citing a group called the American Communities Project, which says there are 171 distinct “college towns” in America. Let’s look at some numbers:
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.
Even where Republicans are winning, they’re losing.
Oh, and this isn’t counting places that aren’t considered “college towns,” by virtue of how there’s a hell of a lot more going on there than just “big college.” For example:
… 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.
Travis is Austin. Bernalillo is Albuquerque. Hennepin is Minneapolis.
Margins, margins, margins. All of this very long article, and all the Republican pant-shitting, is about margins. It’s even hitting perennial Democratic ass-itch Tantalus-reaching-for-grapes situation North Carolina, with its many colleges and college towns. And would you lookie there at that smartypants Biden campaign, specifically focusing on getting North Carolina into the D column for real this time.
Politico mag goes way deeper, and you’ll want to read it all — one interesting thing is that it’s not just the students driving these changes, but also others who are moving to college towns for various reasons — but here is the takeaway:
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, and pretty soon you have a state that’s out of the Republican Party’s reach.
May it be so.
As a coda, and speaking of “not just the students,” but a lot of it is the students, we want to direct your attention to a fabulous Greg Sargent column this week about just how insanely progressive the kids these days have really gotten in just the space of 10 years, and how that’s likely to really fuck the GOP’s Corn Flakes up for decades to come. Turns out they’re going progressive in a way older generations didn’t, and it’s happening for a lot of reasons, but in a lot of ways, the GOP and Donald Trump have only themselves to eternally blame.
If the article about college towns should make Republicans shit their pants, the Greg Sargent column should make them shit their pants again, awwwwww man, Republicans, you all got two separate shits in each of your pants, you sickos, kids really aren’t gonna vote for you now, ewwwwwwwwww.
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“What Democrats are doing in Dane County is truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.”
Have they considered changing their policies to win votes?
Just a quick shoutout to the Travis County Democratic Party*. They've done a lot of good work through the years. To get kind of granular, lots of precincts that used to be tossups are +15 for Dems now. GOTV is usually pretty good, too. North of 70% in 2020. *full disclosure - I was a precinct chair for quite a while.