ANN ARBOR, Mich. — On Monday, the Harris marketing campaign opened a brand new marketing campaign workplace in Ann Arbor, residence to the world-renowned College of Michigan. The closely blue, prosperous metropolis with a big scholar inhabitants is a significant zone of exercise for Democratic electoral technique.
Across the clock, people with clipboards stroll across the campus, hoping to register younger, overwhelmingly Democrat-leaning school college students to vote in Michigan’s hotly contested elections.
One other virtually everlasting fixture of the college’s open garden, generally known as “the Diag,” is a desk run by the tremendous PAC NextGen America, the place activists provide to assist college students register to vote, with Taylor Swift-inspired friendship bracelets as a reward.
Alaina Smith is a grad scholar in Environmental Science from South Berwick, Maine. She says the Diag has at all times been a middle of political activism, particularly with final college yr’s anti-Israel protests.
“There’s an extended historical past of girls’s rights, of civil rights, of minority rights being supported. This previous yr it was not supported by the college. There was an encampment for the assist of Palestine, and that was not supported by the college. And the college continues to make use of safety to stop the group based mostly on political views within the Diag.”
The group NextGen America provides to assist college students register to vote by their technique of alternative: early voting, absentee poll, or in-person.
Based by billionaire ex-presidential candidate Tom Steyer, NextGen deploys its foot troopers to campus, the place they hand out types for college kids to signal, the place they’ll point out their assist of points just like the “local weather disaster” or “racial and immigrant justice.”
The activists operating NextGen America’s desk refused to take questions from The Publish as they canvassed the Diag.
In accordance with a Michigan Every day survey carried out in 2020, greater than 75% of College of Michigan college students described themselves as “considerably liberal” or “very liberal.”
U-M college students quantity 50,000 sturdy, and about half of their undergrads — 16,000 final yr — hail from out of state. So when August comes, so too do a bounty of recent potential progressive voters to this battleground state every year.
And left-wing voter registration teams are seizing on that golden alternative.
Grad scholar Alaina Smith advised The Publish that these teams usually method her on the Diag.
“I’ve been requested a number of occasions,” mentioned Smith. “And I do inform them that I nonetheless vote in my hometown. I’ve vested pursuits and I’m extra conscious and educated on the problems in my own residence state. I simply really feel like a extra knowledgeable voter in Maine.”
Describing the technique of the voter registration orgs, Smith mentioned: “I might say they choose excessive visitors days. Fridays is an enormous one or any day that they know there’s different occasions additionally taking place on campus.”
One of many registration brokers strolling round campus with a clipboard advised The Publish that he works for a gaggle referred to as Ahead Majority, bringing accomplished voter registration types from the campus to the native clerk.
In accordance with its web site, the tremendous PAC Ahead Majority takes “an aggressive technique to safe vital footholds of energy for Democrats.” Two former Democratic marketing campaign staffers named David Cohen and Vicky Hausman lead the group.
FEC filings reveal that Ahead Majority receives hundreds of thousands from left-wing foundations and main funding companies.
Up to now this election cycle, the group has obtained $200,000 from the Soros Basis and over $2 million from Lone Pine Capital, a Connecticut-based hedge fund.
The group boasts of flipping 73 seats in GOP-controlled legislatures throughout ten states, plus amassing one other 100,000 voter registrations in “frontline geographies the place state legislative majorities are gained or misplaced.”
Washtenaw County Clerk Lawrence Kestenbaum explains that, as a result of Nationwide Voter Registration Act of 1993, these extremely partisan voter registration efforts are utterly authorized.
“It was once earlier than the Nationwide Voter Registration Act, that in Michigan, to be able to do a voter registration drive, you needed to have your volunteers, the individuals who had been contacting voters to be educated and deputized by the native clerk. And whereas they had been doing this, they couldn’t do something partisan,” Kestenbaum advised The Publish.
“However the Nationwide Voter Registration Act flipped that utterly, as a result of now there’s a federal type, and you’ll be simply as partisan as you need passing these round.”
In accordance with Kestenbaum, it’s a easy course of for an out-of-state scholar to register to vote in Michigan.
“If somebody resides right here or they’re current right here, in the event that they need to be a Michigan voter, on the whole, in the event that they’re a US citizen and so forth, they are often,” he mentioned.
Ann Arbor is definitely a closely Democratic-leaning metropolis in a Democratic-leaning county, however rising turnout on this space is crucial to the Democratic technique within the state.
In 2020, for instance, Donald Trump gained virtually 400,000 extra voters than when he gained the state in 2016, but didn’t defeat Joe Biden, who gained round 540,000 extra votes in Michigan than Clinton did within the earlier cycle.
Ahead Majority seems assured that aggressive voter registration efforts are the trail to victory in tight races.
“Ahead Majority’s groundbreaking Battleground Voter Challenge goals to register 200,000 untapped suburban voters within the 2024 election cycle,” the org’s web site reads.
Supply hyperlink
