Can out-of-state college students push Kamala Harris over the edge in Wisconsin?

‘We want every student who's going to school in Wisconsin to register and vote in Wisconsin,’ says state Democratic Party chair

by

This is the first time Maggie Hall, 19, will vote for president, and the UW-Madison sophomore wants to make sure her vote has maximum impact: she registered to vote in Wisconsin, a battleground state, rather than her home state of Washington.

“I know that Washington typically always goes blue, and I think that my vote would just stretch further here,” says Hall, one of the 13,000 who filled the Alliant Energy Center to capacity Oct. 30 to see Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Slim voting margins are a guarantee in Wisconsin: former Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden won the state in 2016 and 2020, respectively, with fewer than 23,000 votes between them and their opponents. 

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler tells Isthmus that the party has undertaken a “massive” campus organizing effort this year across every Wisconsin college campus, using tabling, door-knocking and more to get both in-state and out-of-state students to register and vote in Wisconsin. “We want every student who's going to school in Wisconsin to register and vote in Wisconsin.” 

Wikler says that policies made at the state level will affect out-of-state students throughout their time in college and that “we certainly hope they stay in Wisconsin after they graduate.”

“Wisconsin is the state that tipped both of the last two presidential elections, and it tipped them by less than one percentage point,” he adds. “So a vote here is likely to have a bigger impact on the future of every American than a vote almost anywhere else.”

In her speech, Harris spoke directly to young voters, including first-time voters like Hall, noting the troubling world they have known most of their lives and praising their activism. She said the issues students face are not theoretical or political, but their “lived experience.”

“I love your generation. I just love you guys. Let me tell you why. You all are rightly impatient for change — rightly!” Harris said. “You, who have only known the climate crisis, are leading the charge to protect our planet and our future. You, who grew up with active shooter drills, are fighting to keep our schools safe. You, who now know fewer rights than your mothers and grandmothers, are standing up for freedom.”

Harris had star power on her side, too. The four-hour rally featured performances from Gen Z singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams, pop singer Remi Wolf, indie folk band Mumford and Sons, and two members of rock band The National. 

“For many of us here on stage and in this crowd tonight, this is either the first or second time that we've had the privilege of voting in a presidential election. As we know, we've inherited a world that is struggling,” Abrams said, urging the crowd to fight apathy. “We know that unless we vote and keep our democracy intact, there is nothing we will be able to do to fix it when it is our turn.”

Less than a week from the election, it’s nearly impossible for a UW-Madison student to walk through Library Mall without being stopped by a canvasser asking if they’ve registered to vote. But College Democrats of Wisconsin Chair Matthew Lehner says that the many groups are not working together. Those not affiliated with the Democratic Party, he adds, might be effective at reaching students who are independent or undecided.

Those who have lived in a Wisconsin voting ward for at least 28 consecutive days, including college students, are eligible to vote in Wisconsin. In 2023, around 51,000 students enrolled at a Universities of Wisconsin campus were from out of state. The two states contributing the most out-of-state students to the UW system’s 2023 incoming freshman class were Minnesota, at 3,025 students, and Illinois, at 1,782 students. Minnesota, though more competitive this year, is considered a lean-blue state, while Illinois is reliably blue. 

“It's just more natural to vote here too,” Lehner says, “because students spend most of their time [here] if they go to school in Wisconsin.” 

The impact from out-of-state student voting has been a sore spot for state Republicans; one failed GOP-led bill in 2023 would have forced the UW system to provide all out-of-state students with instructions on how to vote in their home state. Young voters turned out in nation-leading numbers during the April 2023 election, propelling the liberal choice for Wisconsin Supreme Court to victory with 11% of the vote. 

“Student turnout in all the UW system schools and the non-UW system schools — I guess now it's called the Universities of Wisconsin — played a massive role in Janet Protasiewicz’ victory,” Wikler says. “We have 320,000 college students in Wisconsin. That's about 15 times Biden's and Trump's margin of victory.”

Organizing those campuses has been an ongoing operation for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and the College Democrats of Wisconsin. Though smaller campuses may have fewer organizers, Lehner feels “the smaller the campus, the easier [it] is to turn out.” Students at smaller campuses know each other better and are able to take advantage of a more intimate knowledge of their campus, he says, even if that campus may be “more centrist-leaning,” like UW-River Falls. 

UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee are by far the deepest blue UW system campuses, with some UW-Madison wards reaching as high as 90% for Biden in 2020, but liberal voting tendencies are common at UW system schools. In 2020, some student wards at UW-Eau Claire went 78% for Biden, and though UW-River Falls had a more tepid showing at 60% for Biden, that Democratic support can make a big difference in the otherwise solidly-red northwestern Wisconsin.

According to the Marquette Law School Poll survey released Oct. 30, Harris has 50% of the votes from Wisconsin’s likely voters, while Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump has 49%. Lehner says Harris has been “leading this game” with her fundraising and ground operations in Wisconsin, including a “record numbers of volunteers.” Five weeks after launching her campaign, more than 42,000 volunteers had already signed up to elect Harris in Wisconsin, according to The Capital Times. 

Nicky Thompson and Audrey Davies, both 19-year-old UW-Madison sophomores, came to the Alliant Center with a large group of friends to support a candidate they see as historic. Neither are Wisconsin-born: Davies is from Colorado and Thompson is from North Carolina. While Davies registered to vote in Wisconsin, Thompson did not. 

“I voted in North Carolina [because while] it's not technically a swing state, my vote also matters there,” Thompson says. “My whole family, we were just like, ‘We're gonna vote in North Carolina.’ Make it like a thing that we can still hopefully get it to be a blue state, because it is a rare occurrence.”

Davies saw Colorado as “typically a blue state” and figured that her vote wouldn’t make much of a difference there: “Here, it's a swing state, and it's probably gonna come down to tens of thousands of votes. So I might as well take the extra couple steps and make my voice heard here.”

Both feel that the large tabling and canvassing presence around student areas of Madison has been effective at making voting a non-negotiable part of student life, whether that’s on campus, on State Street or by the Capitol. “Honestly, everywhere there's people registering to vote, getting people registered, so it's hard to miss it,” Davies says. 

Thompson says that voting is “constantly on people’s minds,” given the outpouring of resources to encourage and facilitate student voting. Students could have ignored voting for “maybe a week,” but Thompson says students are now seeing voters and voter registration efforts “every day.” 

 “At this point, if you’re not voting, it’s a bad look.”