This Is a Really Big Deal': How College Towns Are Decimating the GOP

[applegrove]

This Is a Really Big Deal’: How College Towns Are Decimating the GOP

Growing population in America’s highly educated enclaves has led to huge gains for the Democratic Party. And Republicans are scrambling for answers.

Animation by Shira Inbar for POLITICO

By CHARLIE MAHTESIAN and MADI ALEXANDER

07/21/2023 04:30 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/21/gop-college-towns-00106974

"SNIP.........

MADISON, Wisconsin — Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in record-breaking numbers.

No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something else. Turnout in Dane was higher than anywhere else in the state. And the Democratic margin of victory that delivered control of the nonpartisan court to liberals was even more lopsided than usual — and bigger than in any of the state’s other 71 counties.

The margin was so big that it changed the state’s electoral formula. Under the state’s traditional political math, Milwaukee and Dane — Wisconsin’s two Democratic strongholds — are counterbalanced by the populous Republican suburbs surrounding Milwaukee. The rest of the state typically delivers the decisive margin in statewide races. The Supreme Court results blew up that model. Dane County alone is now so dominant that it overwhelms the Milwaukee suburbs (which have begun trending leftward anyway). In effect, Dane has become a Republican-killing Death Star.

“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.”

........SNIP"

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Encouraging, sure hope this is true nationwide. Voter turnout is and always has been abysmal.

It should be impossible for cons to win most places, FAR more if they voted would vote left vs right.

How do WE get THEM to vote?

[Alexander Of Assyria]

2. Polling places on Election Day...should be national holiday...should be as common as

a 7-11 and voting as easy as purchasing a Slurpee.

Why isn’t it?

Politicians controlling election machinery is…an abomination.

Why do they?

Maybe if election boards could be privatized and profitable…republicans would come around!?

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

3. and the reason repubs try to make it hard for college students to vote

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

4. more: "Name the flagship university -- Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texa

"Name the flagship university — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others — and the story tends to be the same," Politico's report states.

"If the surrounding county was a reliable source of Democratic votes in the past, it’s a landslide county now. There are exceptions to the rule, particularly in the states with the most conservative voting habits. But even in reliably red places like South Carolina, Montana and Texas, you’ll find at least one college-oriented county producing ever larger Democratic margins."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/college-towns-are-becoming-the-gop-s-worst-nightmare-report/ar-AA1ebdyx

[halobeam]

5. this is excellent! I am hoping to see MANY music tours to GOTV!

They always draw the youth in and if anyone's hide is in this race.. it's theirs!

wtg MADISON!!