Campus COVID Shutdowns Affect Voter Registration, GOTV Efforts; Dems Hardest Hit

Yet the pandemic has created thorny challenges for college students trying to cast their ballots this year — and their predicaments are growing more dire as state voter registration deadlines loom.

Many colleges and universities that are still open canceled their fall breaks in an effort to send students home by Thanksgiving, which means some students who had planned on voting early at home in October no longer will have time off to do so.

. . . . The barriers facing youth voters could carry significant electoral consequences for Democrats. National polls show voters under 30 are less likely to identify with a political party but more likely to identify as liberal or progressive, and that recent protests over institutional racism and police brutality of Black Americans have galvanized their interest in the 2020 election.

I find it astounding that college students can’t figure out how or where to vote.  It’s hard not to wonder if the infantilization of America is not at least in part to blame.  After all, I—and tens of millions of my generation of youth voters—managed to figure out how to register to vote and then where to go to cast my vote . . . all without campus organizations to remind me, political GOTV groups to hold my hand, nor as this was long before the internet existed, a vast array of websites to help me.

I found this portion particularly illuminating in terms of college students’ struggling mightily with how to vote and even with where to buy a postage stamp.

Ally Longo, a 19-year-old student at Columbia College Chicago, works with a civic engagement group on campus, Columbia Votes, to help other students navigate voting challenges, including delivering envelopes to mail their voter registration applications and stamps to students who may have difficulty finding them.

. . . .Longo, who is registered to vote in her hometown of Irvine, Calif., worries that mail delays could slow the delivery of her ballot or that she could be forced to go home before her ballot arrives. While she lives in off-campus housing, she is bracing for any potential scenario.

Get out the vote, and voter registration efforts are also being affected by the campus shutdowns. However, various groups are organizing online to help fill the void left by largely empty college campuses.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

College campuses that once reliably boosted Democratic candidates in key swing states have seen voter registration rates plunge amid coronavirus shutdowns, public data show.

Universities across the country have embraced online-only classes or “hybrid” learning models in response to the pandemic. Those restrictions, a Washington Free Beacon review of voter registration data found, have likely dealt a blow to Democrats in some of the most competitive election races in the country. New voter registrations in the vicinity of seven major public universities in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina have plummeted compared with 2016.

The locked-down college campus, in other words, could help determine the 2020 election, as thousands of students either vote from their home states or do not register at all. That could be a setback for Democratic contender Joe Biden, and for Democrats down-ballot, given the party’s overwhelming popularity with America’s most liberal and least politically engaged age group.

Official data show that voter registrations have plummeted across seven large public universities that boast a cumulative population of more than 270,000 voting-age students in four swing states. In 2016, the fall leading up to the November election was a key time for voter sign-ups, with the seven colleges averaging 100 to 200 new registrations every week following the resumption of fall classes. One, the University of Wisconsin Madison, saw more than 1,700 new registrations in the first week of October alone.

What was once a river has become a trickle with average weekly registrations dropping below 40 on campuses. In the weeks since the start of the semester, cumulative registrations fell 94 percent at Ohio University and 93 percent at Michigan State University.

. . . . Madi Mrzygod, president of the College Democrats at North Carolina State University, agreed that voter registration numbers looked better in 2016.

“It is sad to see that we cannot encourage people to go vote by literally handing them a registration form and watching them fill it out, but we do have social media on our side,” she said.

Democrats, who are largely responsible for creating entire generations that can’t seem to formulate a thought of their own nor feel empowered to solve a single problem—stamps, where on earth does one get stamps?!—without relying on political organizations or government, are also, appropriately, the ones most likely to feel the sting in November.