When the Michigan State University College Democrats held their weekly meetings last spring at a sprawling residential hall on campus, organizers were lucky if they could get more than 30 students to show up.
There was little enthusiasm for President Biden, the presumptive nominee whom many students regarded as too old. Laticia Martinez, a junior who is the group’s vice president, said she ultimately would have supported Mr. Biden but felt a sense of “guilt” when weighing her choices.
“I didn’t want to not vote, but it’s so hard to get behind someone who I really just didn’t feel was speaking for me,” she said. “Pretty much at that point, it was the lesser of two evils.”
But the club’s first meeting of the semester this fall drew nearly 200 students, reflecting what undergraduates say has been a surge in Democratic enthusiasm on campus since Mr. Biden dropped out and Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee. Now Democratic candidates up and down the ticket in Michigan are hoping to capitalize on that shift to bolster their bids.
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.
The candidates have made themselves and their campaigns a ubiquitous presence on campus at activities fairs and student club meetings. They have hired students on campus to register their peers to vote.
They have gamed out how to deploy volunteers to knock on doors in compliance with dormitory rules and sought to reorient the voting lines on Election Day so fewer students have to wait outdoors. Their aides are in near constant communication with the president of the College Democrats club, Liam Richichi, checking in on what he is hearing on the ground.
“We do our job right, we can move this district a full percentage point, two points in our direction” on campus alone, Mr. Hertel said as he walked by the student union on a recent sunny Sunday. “We are focusing our energy everywhere — festivals, farmers markets, parades. We’re knocking doors across the district every day. But we have a unique responsibility here.”
Ms. Slotkin saw firsthand the fruits of such a strategy in 2022, when she was pushing against strong headwinds in her battle to keep her House seat. She bet that support from the students at Michigan State could help her fend off a challenge from Tom Barrett, a Republican state senator who last cycle removed a section of his website that described him as “100 percent pro life — no exceptions.”
The students showed up in droves, in part drawn by a referendum codifying the right to an abortion in the State Constitution, standing in line for hours on a chilly fall evening to vote. In the end, the referendum passed and Ms. Slotkin was re-elected by a margin of five points.
“The proof is in the pudding on how important students are in Michigan elections,” she said.
To win this year, Democrats are hoping for a similar or greater degree of voter enthusiasm on campus — an outcome that seemed improbable last spring when antipathy for Mr. Biden and campus unrest over Israel’s offensive in Gaza threatened to dampen students’ appetite for backing Democrats. With Ms. Harris as the nominee and campus strife over the war simmered down for the moment, it now seems possible.
It amounts to a sea change from where they were before Mr. Biden dropped off the ticket. Long before Democratic lawmakers and power brokers came to the same conclusion over the summer, students at Michigan State had already made up their minds that Mr. Biden was just too old. Many were considering staying home on Election Day or voting for a third-party candidate.
That would have been disastrous not only for Mr. Biden, but also for the congressional candidates down the ballot whose races students often pay little attention to.
Ms. Slotkin said in an interview that before Mr. Biden left the race, her campaign was seeing anemic interest from students and contemplating “very different choices” about whether to mount the kind of campus turnout effort she stood up in 2022.
“The sheer amount of time and energy it took to convince one single undergraduate student to vote was almost not worth the price of the program,” she said. “If you’re paying someone to sit outside the student union and register voters and no one’s registering, those dollars might be better used somewhere else, right? And we were very much having those conversations.”
Interviews with roughly two dozen students at Michigan State — some involved in Democratic politics on campus and others who described themselves as barely following politics — suggested that excitement about Ms. Harris had replaced antipathy for Mr. Biden as the prevailing sentiment about the election.
“It’s brought out a lot of people,” said Elliott Alden, a senior who was attending a College Democrats meeting for the first time on a recent Tuesday night. “A lot of people didn’t like Biden, thought he was too old. And I do agree that no one should be 80 running for president.”
Lucas Gravatt, a senior who was registering students to vote one evening at a table by the entrance to a popular dining hall, said he had seen a sharp uptick in student interest in registering to vote since Ms. Harris entered the race. “We didn’t have any of that before with Biden,” he said.
“People are absolutely more likely to vote for Harris,” Mr. Gravatt said. “Just the fact that she’s younger, the fact that she’s coherent, she can actually debate.”
Few students said they were following the Senate or House races. A handful volunteered the name of Ms. Slotkin, citing her previous work at the Pentagon. One freshman, who signed up to vote for the first time at a residential hall, said he was not yet sure whom he would support for president, and did not know who his congresswoman was.
“Gretchen Whitmer?” he asked uncertainly, naming the popular Democratic governor.
But there were signs that at least fragments of the barrage of information aimed at the students had broken through.
James Pokorny, a freshman studying economics who approached a voter registration booth to change his registration from Tennessee to Michigan, said he would “probably vote for Harris” after initially planning to vote for a third-party candidate when Mr. Biden was the Democratic nominee. “I definitely did not like him,” he said.
Mr. Pokorny said he was not paying attention to the congressional races in Michigan, but recalled a political advertisement attacking Mr. Barrett, the Republican Mr. Hertel is facing in November.
Asked what he remembered about the advertisements, Mr. Pokorny replied, “Just that he’s obsessed with abortion bans or something.”
He was quoting almost verbatim the opening line of an advertisement by House Democrats’ main political action committee that repeatedly appears on YouTube videos streamed on campus that accuses Mr. Barrett of being “obsessed” with banning abortion.
Mr. Pokorny initially said the ad would do little to sway him, saying he thought it was aimed more toward Republican women. But then he paused and added: “I care about it, and I hope we have abortion rights, obviously. I have a girlfriend; I want them to have the right to abortion.”
Mr. Barrett has said that he believes he has a better shot at winning the seat this year because Mr. Hertel does not have the advantages of incumbency that Ms. Slotkin had, including the huge war chest she had amassed. But he has also argued that abortion rights will be a less salient issue this year because it is not on the ballot in Michigan.
Mr. Hertel and Ms. Slotkin, who are each running multiple ads focused on reproductive rights, are betting differently.
“People understand that Michigan did its job,” Ms. Slotkin said, “but the other side of the aisle has so consistently gone after every corner of choice: I.V.F., mifepristone, travel of women state to state.”
“I think choice is still a very big issue,” she added, “but it’s a bigger basket of issues that go to the heart of whether we trust women or not.”
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