Nati Harnik/AP Photo
Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez greet supporters following an election rally on the campus of Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs, Iowa, November 8, 2019.
Even with February’s Iowa caucuses just two months away, voters have struggled to settle on any consensus. One mid-November poll saw Pete Buttigieg sporting a 9 percent lead over second-place Joe Biden and a 10 percent edge over Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders; some 48 hours later, another Iowa poll emerged placing Sanders and Biden in the driver’s seat, with Buttigieg and Warren bringing up the rear. No one really knows what’s going on.
The blind spots and deficiencies of polling were well catalogued in a dizzying array of postmortems of the 2016 presidential election. But there are certain roadblocks that hinder the practice. To be identified for participation, one has to be considered a “likely voter,” which can necessitate, among other things, voting in multiple previous election cycles, or having a landline phone that can be reached by pollsters. That means that certain demographics of possible voters remain largely invisible to polls, including one group that may well have a major impact on the final outcome: students.
Youth voter turnout hasn’t historically been very significant, and students as a group fly below the political radar. But that doesn’t mean they’re a lightweight constituency. By 2020, millennials will have surpassed boomers in terms of eligible voters, which is to say nothing of Gen Z voters, who will also be eligible in nontrivial numbers.
A recent city council race in Iowa shows how powerful a political constituency young voters could be. On November 5, 20-year-old Iowa State University student Rachel Junck shocked the political establishment in the Ames, Iowa, city council race. Junck’s campaign managed to surpass a two-term city council incumbent by 15 points, coming up just seven votes short of an outright, 50-percent-plus-one majority. A runoff will be held on Tuesday.
Junck’s ascendance came in large part due to some novel techniques to target college voters, which resulted in unprecedented turnout in a hyper-local, off-year election. Importantly, because many students aren’t registered to vote, or aren’t registered in the jurisdiction of their colleges, they don’t show up as potential voters in major voter databases, nor in the traditional canvassing technology relied upon by major campaigns all over the country.
The Junck campaign combined more typical door-knocking with an approach that targeted high-turnover, student-dense areas. They blanketed student housing, and nominated “dorm captains that would help get students registered to vote in their dorms,” Taylor Blair, Junck’s campaign manager, told me. They also targeted fraternities and sororities for voter registration, and knocked blindly in apartment buildings known to be student-heavy.
The results were startling: In three of the city’s four precincts that are student-dominated, turnout increased by 188 percent, 231 percent, and nearly 600 percent, respectively. All told, some 20 percent of voters were newly registered. For a campaign that targeted mostly low-hanging participatory fruit on a shoestring budget, that’s an astonishing increase. It’s especially notable in Iowa, where presidential-primary candidates deploy high-level political messaging and massive financial expenditure every four years, to a degree that’s basically unrivaled in any other American state. “There’s a vicious cycle when politicians are campaigning,” says Blair. “Students don’t vote, so they don’t invest, so they don’t vote. It’s a vicious cycle, and we wanted to break out of that.”
Because college students are so itinerant, often changing addresses every nine months, voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns have shied away from them. Although the voting power of students may elude pollsters, it is not unknown to political operatives. Since the outset of this election cycle, it’s been widely understood that 2020 could be an election that may be decided by students. While students have become the target of certain campaigns, like Bernie Sanders’s, with high youth enthusiasm, they’re also the target of voter suppression laws for that same reason.
Even before Junck’s run, the student voting bloc in Iowa had shown its ascendant potential. During the 2018 midterm elections, Iowa State University saw significant surges in voter turnout, with percentages reaching general-election levels, and nearly doubling turnout rates over the 2014 midterm cycle. Nearly 14,000 Iowa State students participated in the 2018 midterms.
Those participatory gains were quickly threatened by the enactment of one of the country’s more restrictive voter ID laws, which became Iowa law just months later, in January of 2019. One provision of that law targeted students in particular: Student IDs were not considered valid identification for voting.
Meanwhile, there’s also been subsequent legislation introduced in the state aiming to close all polling places on public-university campuses. That same bill would move up the deadline for absentee voters, requiring that absentee ballots be received by the county election commissioner’s office by the time polls close on Election Day in order to be counted, rather than just being postmarked by Election Day. That bill also included a provision that would require graduating students (from public colleges only!) to sign a form declaring their intention to stay in state in order to prevent themselves from getting preemptively purged from voter rolls. With a Republican majority dominating state politics, they’ve followed similar voter suppression tactics to those seen in more publicly maligned states like Georgia.
In a place like Ames, Iowa, where half of the town’s population is made up of the 36,000 students at Iowa State, these preventative measures would overhaul the state’s electorate entirely. With over 80,000 students in Iowa statewide, the student voting bloc could have a profound impact, if novel get-out-the-vote initiatives like the one used by the Junck campaign can overcome the force of Republican voter suppression efforts trained on students in particular.
“It’s a problem we need to solve for the Iowa caucuses,” says Shawn Sebastian, the Iowa Organizing Director of the Working Families Party. “There are [nearly] 20 multimillion-dollar campaigns here in the state with staff, and they aren’t doing the sort of outreach that an off-year campaign run by students is doing.”
Though the student vote is relatively modest in number, it could make all the difference in Iowa when the general election comes around in November 2020. Iowa is a true swing state: Obama won it twice before Trump carried it by 10 percent in 2016. And yet, in 2018, three of the four House seats up for election were won by Democrats, with Steve King representing the only Republican to hold on, by just a few percentage points. Increased turnout by ISU students in Ames, which is in King’s district, was nearly enough to knock him from his perch.
And that logic extends beyond the Hawkeye State. Neighboring Midwestern swing states like Ohio and Michigan with large public and private university systems offer a similar pool of unidentified voters. With all the attention paid to winning back Trump voters in the country’s purple corners, college students could be the key for Democrats to reverse the Republican takeover in the Midwest, not just for the presidency, but at state and local government levels, as well.
