Are college students voting more for Democrats than they used to? Marquette University research fellow John Johnson analyzed campus voting in Wisconsin to see how things have changed since the 2016 election. He spoke with WNIJ education reporter Peter Medlin…
WNIJ’s Peter Medlin (PM): What were some of your big takeaways from the analysis?
John Johnson (JJ): It's true that Donald Trump won in 2024, in part, by doing better with young people. That's every way you want to measure it: public opinion data, voter file analysis, and then what I did in Wisconsin was just to look at how the wards around the state's biggest college campuses voted. Donald Trump did quite noticeably better in 2024 than he did in 2020.
(PM): There are opposing parts of that, right? There's definitely been the story, like you mentioned, that Donald Trump did better with younger people in 2024 than previously. But there's also, I think, a perception very alive still that college students and young people in general have gotten more liberal or progressive, voting more for Democrats. But again, one of the things that we find here is that that is not universally the case, especially when it comes to presidential election voting. And it turns out college campuses are different.
(JJ): Yeah, they are. So, if you look at the big schools in Wisconsin, they range from super liberal, like the most liberal is Lawrence University, which is a liberal arts college at the top of Lake Winnebago in Appleton. In 2024, only 12% of the voters in the wards around Lawrence University voted for Trump, and then at the extreme other end of that, you got places like UW-La Crosse, UW-Oshkosh, where about half of the voters in those campus wards, where they're mostly students, voted for Trump.
(PM): You were able to look back to the 2016 presidential election through 2020 to 2024 and see how voting patterns shifted on those campuses. Can you talk about some of the college campuses where there was the largest shift to the right since 2016?
(JJ): Yeah, I think the one that jumps out the most is UW-La Crosse, where 35% voted for Trump in 2016. That increased to 41% in 2020, and then 50% in 2024. So really, quite a significant jump across that.
(PM): One of the other interesting things, I think, is that there's also a perception that college students are at least more liberal or progressive than the other people in the town they live in; that students at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse would be more liberal or vote for Democrats more than the other residents of La Crosse, but that also not universally the case.
(JJ): That's right. In fact, it's often not the case at all. I think maybe the most interesting example of this is UW Madison. Madison is a famously liberal place. The campus is the heart of the community in many ways. But, in fact, when you look at how the wards vote there, they're more conservative than the rest of the town.
In 2024, the campus wards voted 22% for Donald Trump and, in the rest of the city, he only got 15% of the vote. Another way you can put this is, in the in the wards surrounding UW-Madison's campus, roughly one in five voters voted for Trump. That's certainly a small number. I mean, he got about half the vote statewide. But one in five, you can imagine in a class, that's a considerable number of students. It's enough that you can probably have a conversation. There are large wards on the eastern part of the isthmus in Madison where fewer than one in 20 voters voted for Donald Trump. These are not where the students live. But the difference between a one-in-five ward and a one-in-20 ward, I think, is enormous.
(PM): Right, and I think part of that is, especially at a big flagship school like UW-Madison, people are coming from all over the state and all over the country to go to school there.
(JJ): That's exactly right. That's how I interpret these numbers as well, and we see that to an even greater degree at some of the other UW schools like UW-La Crosse or UW-Platteville, even Marquette University that draw students from quite a range around the state and around other states as well. That's true to my experience attending Western Illinois University; there's a true diversity of political views among the students there.
(PM): Yeah, and one of the other things your analysis did is look at a few elections post-2024, specifically the Wisconsin Supreme Court elections, where you saw the campus vote swing pretty hard to the left. I think the question then becomes: Is it that those college students regretted their vote for Donald Trump? Is it because Republicans are just less reliable at turning out those voters in off-year elections, or is it maybe just a little bit of both?
(JJ): I don't want to discount the possibility that some of these voters changed their mind. It's certainly possible; 18,19, 20-year-olds voting for the first time. It's normal for your opinions to be in flux at that age, but the speed at which this changed is amazing. In November 2024, across all of the campus wards in the state I looked at, Donald Trump got 31% of the vote. Then April 2025 was the Supreme Court election, during the same school year, the same students. This was a very high turnout, very high profile, very partisan election, even though it's officially nonpartisan.
(PM): Tons of money spent on it.
(JJ): Yeah, tons of money. The nonpartisan nature of these elections is complete fiction at this point. The correlation between them and presidential elections is 0.99, where one equals perfect correlation. So, the share of the vote for the Republican-endorsed candidate in that race was 14% Again, earlier in that same school year, Trump had won 31% of the vote. It just fell off a cliff for Republicans, and you see that turnout also fell quite dramatically on campus wards between those elections.
I think what this tells us, which was a little surprising to me, is that even among people enrolled in college, Trump's strength is among students who are unreliable voters. We had known for years now that Trump had this particular strength among voters who are don't show up that reliably. Donald Trump wins in 2024 with this extremely high turnout in Wisconsin, the highest turnout in the country, in fact, as a share of eligible voters. But we knew that when turnout was lower, Democrats would do better because they had this strength among frequent voters.
The standard explanation for this was that it was a function of education. Democrats have grown this really big advantage among highly-educated voters. Highly-educated voters are the people who show up in off-year elections. But what this look at campus awards shows is that, even among students with the same level of education, people enrolled as undergraduates at college campuses, the Democrats still have this turnout advantage. Even among people who are college students, the college students who are the most interested in voting all the time appear to be Democrats. Those college students who maybe only vote in November, maybe only vote in presidential years, more of them support Republicans.
