The nation is on edge as it awaits the outcome of this year’s presidential election. Will it be the cliff-hanger that many polls suggest? Will Kamala Harris emerge the winner in line with recent suggestions of new momentum for her, or will Donald Trump prevail again, buoyed by a large turnout of his MAGA supporters?
Prognosticators have focused on the widening gender gap with women favoring Harris and men preferring Trump, both by double-digit differences. Racial and ethnic differences are another major factor, as are religious affiliations, and socioeconomic status.
The nature of the local communities where voters reside also plays a role, as suggested by results from the American Communities Project, a social science/journalism effort by the Michigan State University School of Journalism. The ACP uses a vast array of data – including election results, educational levels, population density, economic numbers and racial composition – to cluster communities into 15 types of counties, including Big Cities, Evangelical Hubs, Middle Suburbs, and Aging Farmlands.
One of the categories is College Towns, 171 cities and counties identified by at the presence of a relatively large percentage of college students, with 10% of their population between the ages of 20 and 24 — the most of any of the other types of counties.
In ACP’s College Towns, average income is below the national average partly because of the large student populations. They are also less diverse than the nation as a whole: about 78% white, 6% Black, 5% Hispanic, and 3% Asian.
However, of most significance for the 2024 election, these counties have moved dramatically toward Democrats in recent presidential elections. Joe Biden won the vote coming out of these counties in 2020 by about 10 points, 54% to 44%. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 49% of the vote while Trump received 45%.
One recent poll found Harris with a 38 percentage point lead among college students, and Harris leads Trump by 78% to 8% among college faculty according to an Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research survey. Those results are not restricted to college towns as defined by the ACP, but they give an idea of the magnitude of difference associated with this higher education variable.
After the 2020 presidential election, I looked at the college town “diploma divide” in the counties where the 14 Big Ten universities (at that time) were located. I was particularly interested in the Big Ten because several of its member schools were in states – Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa – that were considered before that election to be battlegrounds. I used Politico’s vote totals to tabulate the vote in those counties.
Biden won the Big Ten counties decisively. If they had been treated as their own state or bloc, the “popular Big 10 vote” was won by Biden by more than two million votes (3,184,462 – 1,147,647), a 73.5% to 26.5% margin.
Every single Big 10 county went for Biden, from a razor-thin margin of 49% to 48.4% in Tippecanoe, Indiana (Purdue University) to a landslide of 89.5% to 8.9% in Prince George’s County (University of Maryland).
In three closely contested states — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota — that proved crucial to Biden’s eventual victory in 2020, the Big Ten county margin was so large that it clearly played a role in the outcome.
The potential importance of college towns in the 2024 election becomes more apparent if we consider that the so-called “swing states” like Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and the late emerging battleground of Iowa have a significant presence of college town communities. And in some of those states, the partisan divide among these communities has been growing in recent elections.
Here’s one example. According to Politico, 20 years ago, Washtenaw County, home to the University of Michigan, gave Al Gore a 60% to 36% win over George W. Bush, a margin of about 34,000 votes. In 2020, Biden won Washtenaw by almost 50 percentage points, or about 101,000 votes.
In addition, the Politico summary of the the ACP’s 171 College Towns found that in recent elections, 38 have flipped from red to blue since the 2000 presidential election, while only seven have gone the other way, from blue to red. “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,” Politico reported.
With the stakes of this election for higher education so obviously high, look for a strong turnout in communities with a substantial university or college presence. This year that turnout could be a difference-maker.