MI-SEN, MI-07: In Michigan, Democrats Hope to Benefit From a Post-Biden Surge of Youth Energy
Congressional campaigns rarely put much effort into courting college students, known for being unreliable, poorly informed voters. But at Michigan State this year, the campus’s student body of 50,000 is at the epicenter of three exceedingly tight races — presidential, Senate and House — that could be decided by just a few thousand votes.
Curtis Hertel, a Democratic former state senator who is running for an open House seat, says his highly competitive race and his party’s bid to win the majority may well come down to the students on this verdant campus, where one of his campaign signs now hangs in the window of the dorm he lived in when he was a freshman almost 30 years ago.
Mr. Hertel is battling through one of the most competitive congressional contests in the nation, defending the seat vacated by Representative Elissa Slotkin, long considered one of Democrats’ strongest fund-raisers and campaigners.
So both he and Ms. Slotkin, who is facing Mike Rogers, the former Republican congressman, in her bid for the U.S. Senate, are aggressively pursuing the youth vote on campus. They are banking on a swell of student turnout energized by Ms. Harris and a campaign message centered on protecting the abortion rights that Michigan voters enshrined in the state’s Constitution in 2022.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/us/politics/in-michigan-democrats-hope-to-benefit-from-a-post-biden-surge-of-youth-energy.html
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