Campaigns rethink how to reach college students amid pandemic

Political campaigns up and down the ballot are scrambling to turn out college students this election cycle, hoping the voting bloc will help turn the tide in November’s general election. 

But this year that effort is hitting unique roadblocks as campaigns work to reach students who are completing their degrees amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, with many students going to school virtually, grappling with outbreaks of the virus on campuses or unsure what their college experience will look like next week or next month. 

Campaigns and political groups face an additional hurdle of educating students on the process of mail-in voting, even as Americans are hearing mixed signals on the validity of the process.

That’s forcing campaigns to rethink and retool their strategies around young voters.

Gone are the days of large in-person college rallies and campus voter registration events. Instead, campaigns and groups have pivoted to digital turnout efforts.

“Because this is a more digitally native generation, it’s more intuitive for them to organize through group chats, through social media,” said Solomon Steen, a member of the Massachusetts chapter of the progressive group Our Revolution. 

Polls show that college students are motivated to vote, and are willing to make their voice heard in person or by mail. 

A survey released by the Knight Foundation last month found that 71 percent of college students polled said they were “absolutely certain” they would vote in the upcoming election. The same poll also found that 53 percent of all students polled said they planned to vote by mail. Sixty-three percent of Democratic students said they wanted to vote by mail, while 31 percent of Republican students said the same. 

The Biden and Trump campaigns have reached out to student leaders on specific campuses in an effort to engage their student bases. 

The Trump campaign has organized its college student turnout effort through its Make Campus Great Again Program, which includes campus team leaders that assist the campaign with recruitment, training and engagement in-person and virtually. There are currently 73 target campuses as part of the program, with 555 campus team leaders. 

“The Trump campaign has a robust network of student supporters and is constantly identifying new voters ahead of November’s election,” said Trump campaign deputy national press secretary Samantha Zager. “As Joe Biden and the Democrats seek to keep schools closed this fall, our youth engagement efforts will continue both virtually and in-person, and we will expand the base of young voters for President Trump.” 

The Biden campaign launched Students for Biden in 2019 as part of their effort to mobilize college voters. The group has more than 380 chapters across the country. Additionally, the campaign hired full-time staff dedicated to galvanizing voters on campuses in more than 10 battleground states. 

“Young Americans are a driving force of our campaign and are working day in and day out to empower, engage, and mobilize their communities between now and Election Day,” Biden campaign spokesman Matt Hill said. “We have built a robust network of students, young elected officials, and other young people across the country who are organizing online and offline, helping peers make plans to vote, and ensuring we can defeat Donald Trump and win the battle for the soul of the nation.”

There is also the question of mail-in voting, and how to educate new voters on what can be a confusing process. 

“When it comes to young people and when it comes to college kids, the important thing to remember is that they’re new voters,” said Andrew Feldman, a spokesman for Rock the Vote, a progressive-aligned group that works to engage young voters.

“So now they’re new voters in a time when voting in a pandemic isn’t like it was,” he continued. “We have to educate them just as much, if not more than we did previously.” 

Rock the Vote has put on a number of virtual events aimed at engaging younger voters, notably launching the Democracy Summer 2020 initiative, which registered 400,000 young voters over the summer. 

On the other side of the aisle, Students for Trump, which is connected to the young conservative group Turning Point USA, has also reached out to students in the virtual space. 

“Registering voters is our No. 1 goal,” the group’s national field director Austin Smith told The Hill. “Social media and virtual has been the name of the game recently since there hasn’t been a whole lot of in person campaigning, but we’ve held multiple webinars with members of Congress, big voices in the conservative movement, senators, governors, to keep our students engaged.” 

The group holds “Super Saturdays,” in which they take part in a number of voter mobilization activities, including door knocking. The group held one in Grand Rapids, Mich., last month, where nearly 400 people knocked on 10,000 doors in the area, according to Smith. 

Other groups, including the nonpartisan All In Campus Democracy Challenge, which is a partner of Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote, are working to provide students with online tools to educate themselves on the voting process. 

The group recently launched a non-partisan online tool, dubbed All In To Vote, allowing students to hold themselves accountable through pledging to vote and working out their own roadmap ahead of November.  

“That site is aimed toward first time voters, and college students in particular who face an increased number of hurdles as they try to navigate a system that changes across states and other localities,” said the group’s executive director Jen Domagal-Goldman. “That process will help them understand where they register and what things they would need to do in order to request an absentee ballot.” 

The election will mark the first time many members of Generation Z will make their voices heard at the ballot box or on mail-in ballots. 

Political watchers got their first glimpse of how campaigns and outside groups reach this new group of voters during the pandemic in last Tuesday’s Massachusetts primaries, particularly in Boston, one of the country’s biggest college cities. The race was also one of the commonwealth’s first statewide election where mail-in voting was an option. Incumbent Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) cruised to victory in his primary against Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.) after garnering the support of college students despite Markey, 74, being the oldest candidate in the race. 

State officials expected mail-in ballots to drive record turnout and in the end more than 1.3 million people voted in the Senate race. In 2018, about 980,000 people voted in the state’s primaries.

Organizers credit the progressive movement’s success in the Bay State to a grassroots organizing infrastructure put in place by groups like the Sunrise Movement and Our Revolution. 

“That has allowed a lot of young people to really feel empowered by politics in a way that you don’t see in a lot of other electoral campaigns,” Steen said. 

“We’ve seen this pattern of people coming into these organizations and building specific skills that then transfer to other campaigns and other efforts, whether it’s learning how to organize and run just an individual event or learning how to train teams of volunteers, and then higher level skills, like actually setting campaign goals and being able to track progress in meeting different metrics over time,” he continued. 

Steen said that involving young people and first-time voters in campaigns and advocacy groups has the potential to change the face of campaigns for the long term. 

“Hopefully going forward we’re going to see more campaigns working to make sure that they are number one, compensating young people for the valuable contributions that they’re making and number two, making sure that young people are given positions of authority so that they can influence the way that campaigns themselves are run,” he said.