How college towns are KILLING the GOP
Leftist bastion Politico is beside itself — giggling with glee. As Raleigh leaders allow student IDs to be used for voter registration and voting, we are getting a good look at the horror so many cities, counties and states across the country have already seen:
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.”[…]
Stuff like this is why we need to jump on — and stay on — hijinks like allowing college IDs or the ‘I didn’t know’ excuse to get out of showing ID to vote. This is why we need our super-majorities in Raleigh to flex some muscles and snatch control of state campuses from the leftist hordes.
Things like that are just the tip of the iceberg in the grand plan to sideline us and turn the whole ball of wax over to the socialist hordes.
MORE:
[…] In isolation, it’s a worrisome development for Republicans. Unfortunately for the larger GOP, it’s not happening in isolation.
In state after state, fast-growing, traditionally liberal college counties like Dane are flexing their muscles, generating higher turnout and ever greater Democratic margins. They’ve already played a pivotal role in turning several red states blue — and they could play an equally decisive role in key swing states next year.
Name the flagship university — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others — and the story tends to be the same. 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.
[…] North Carolina offers a revealing snapshot of a state whose college towns have altered its electoral landscape. Five of the state’s nine counties that contain so-called college towns have gone blue since voting for George W. Bush in 2000. Back then, the nine counties together netted roughly 12,000 votes for Bush, who carried the state by nearly 13 percent. Twenty years later, those numbers had broken dramatically in the opposite direction — Biden netted 222,000 votes from those counties. He still lost the state, but the margin was barely more than 1 percent.
There’s no single factor driving the college town trend. In some places, it’s an influx of left-leaning, highly educated newcomers, drawn to growing, cutting-edge industries advanced by university research or the vibrant quality of life. In others, it’s rising levels of student engagement on growing campuses. Often, it’s a combination of both.
What’s clear is that these places are altering the political calculus across the national map. Combine university counties with heavily Democratic big cities and increasingly blue suburbs, and pretty soon you have a state that’s out of the Republican Party’s reach.
None of this has gone unnoticed by the GOP, which is responding in ways that reach beyond traditional tensions between conservative lawmakers and liberal universities — such as targeting students’ voting rights, creating additional barriers to voter access or redrawing maps to dilute or limit the power of college communities. But there are limits to what those efforts can accomplish. They aren’t geared toward growing the GOP vote, merely toward suppressing Democratic totals. And they aren’t addressing the structural problems created by the rising tide of college-town votes — students are only part of the overall phenomenon.[…]
Thanks for posting this article. Will our NC GOP legislators pay it any mind? Will they appoint conservative reformers to the UNC system boards? Does the NC GOP leadership understand that college towns, led by the UNC system schools, are turning NC blue? Sadly, the answer is probably not. Too many RINOs think it”s their sworn duty to protect and expand the liberal UNC establishment. We are going to pay a heavy price for this GOP stupidity. Living in Chapel Hill and following daily what goes on at UNC, I can tell you that UNC-CH is more liberal now than it was when the GOP took control of the appointment process. The blame clearly lies with the GOP legislature who have betrayed conservatives on UNC system policy.
I’ve been ranting about this for years! Guilford County had 8 Universities & Colleges. Their students are allowed to vote without any ID or confirmation they are voting absentee at home. It’s killing us in Guilford County
David, of course it’s killing the GOP. But our legislative leadership could care less. The GOP legislature and GOP Board of Governors has allowed UNC-Greensboro to remain a leftist sanctuary with a radical leftist chancellor ever since we took control of the legislature in 2010. Go figure. Look at the RINOs that have been appointed to the UNC-Greensboro trustee board. You get the picture.
When our daughter attended UNC-G from 2000-2004, the conservative students like her called it UNC-Gay.
It’s even worse today. The RINOs appointed to the UNC-G trustee board are making the school even more liberal than it was when your daughter was there. It is viciously anti-GOP now and getting worse.