In 2020, students voted at historic rates. Will they vote again?

“Can I help you find your polling place?” she asked another student who approached her, looking for the Harris sign marking her dorm room.

According to the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, a historic high of 66% of students voted in the 2020 presidential election, a 12% increase from 2016. An important question for Harris’ campaign in swing states like Michigan is whether students , who voted for Joe Biden by a large majority in 2020, will reappear in 2024.

Harris’ entry into the race this summer sparked a surge in enthusiasm among young voters who appeared to be drifting away from Biden. A September poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that 64 percent of likely voters aged 18 to 29 favored her, compared with 32 percent who backed Trump. In the spring, only about 56 percent of young voters said they supported Biden, according to the poll.

To capitalize on the surge of energy, the Harris campaign has doubled its staff focused on youth organizing and campuses, a campaign spokesman said. The hiring increase coincided with Harris’ tour of more than a dozen college campuses in seven swing states.

In Michigan, Harris’ campaign efforts focused less on high-profile events visits from the vice president rather than the labor-intensive work of ensuring students register and vote. To date, the campaign has involved more than 40 field organizers on 14 campuses across the state. A spokesman for the campaign called it “the largest-ever youth organizing program in Michigan history.”

Grand Valley is located in a part of the state that has traditionally favored Republicans and is less diverse than most large public universities in Michigan; approximately 80 percent of students identify as white. For Democrats, the main attraction of the campus is that 90 percent of its students are from Michigan, drawn to the school by its affordability and proximity to Grand Rapids.

Like many universities, Grand Valley has seen a surge in political activity since 2016, when Hillary Clinton ended her campaign with a speech on campus. According to the Institute of Democracy and Higher Education, turnout among university students was only about 45 percent this year. Four years later, that number had risen to 72 percent, and Biden won about two-thirds of the votes cast in the main campus district.

Protests over Israel’s war with Hamas, who disturbed the peace on other campuses, have been relatively muted here. Instead, students are more likely to talk about high housing costs, fears that they won’t be able to match their parents’ standard of living, and frustration with the country’s increasingly vicious and dysfunctional politics. Many students – both Republicans and Democrats – said they had given up even trying to have conversations across partisan lines.

DeVoogd, who graduated from the University of Wyoming in May and will vote in her first election this fall, is not much different from the people she is trying to reach. Her first memories of politics were the 2016 election and the Women’s March on Washington, which took place 24 hours after Trump’s inauguration and served as a mass demonstration against his victory. She was 14 when she and her mother came from her hometown of Casper, Wyoming, to be there.

She landed the job with Harris’ campaign in August, shortly after the vice president became the de facto nominee. “The first female, black president,” DeVoogd said. “I just had to be a part of it.”

The joy and excitement of DeVoogd’s early days have given way to hardship ahead of another extremely close election, the third of three cycles if polls prove correct.

DeVoogd’s constant presence on campus has allowed her to develop friendships with some of the students. – How is your new roommate? – she asked one student who had problems with her previous one.

Most of DeVoogd’s conversations, however, are fleeting. Sometimes students stop by her table at the base of the university’s clock tower to make sure they’re registered. “On Monday, a boy and a girl came to my comparative religion class to sign us up,” one student explained. DeVoogd checked his registration online, confirmed it and informed him of the location of his polling place.

Others asked her to check the status of their absentee ballots. “Send it in the mail as soon as you get it,” DeVoogd repeatedly warned.

Nearly all of DeVoogd’s calls ended with her asking students to fill out a vote pledge form so that the campaign would remind them to turn out for Harris when early voting began on Oct. 26. On her best day in late August, DeVoogd and her partner at Grand Valley recorded 327 such commitments. On a more typical day, the score might have been between 10 and 20. On a day when hundreds of free slices of pizza were offered, she wrote about 80.

He will soon increase his working hours from 55 to 65 hours a week, and in the seven days before the elections it will reach 77 hours. The thought of all those hours of fragmented conversations and all those students running alongside her with headphones on as she called out to them was exhausting.

“You have to remind yourself that this is a much bigger picture than just me not wanting to talk to someone,” she said. “I am the one potentially persuading the voter or committing to Harris.”

In a nearby building, Grand Valley College Republicans gathered for their weekly meeting. Two new club members – both freshmen – wondered why there were no groups on campus working to determine Trump voters.

A few days earlier, 18-year-old Marc Dykstra had gone to the campus clock tower, where DeVoogd had set her table. Because the race was so close, he wanted to help the Republican cause in any way he could. And so he began debating with the assembled Democrats. He questioned the wisdom of Harris’s border policy and questioned her plan to offer up to $25,000 to help first-time homebuyers with a down payment. “Throwing money at a problem is the democratic way to deal with it,” he recalled telling them. “This will only increase inflation.”

Soon a crowd began to form. “At one point I was debating seven people,” he said.

Feeling outnumbered, he and another freshman he met during the debate decided to attend their first College Republicans meeting. The special guest that night was state senator Roger Victory, a moderate Republican whose district bordered campus. Victory spent most of the meeting listening to students talk about the difficulties of being a conservative in the Great Valley.

“I told people who I was rooting for and they laughed at me and made fun of me,” said Matthew Uthe, 21. “It’s a hostile environment.”

“Is this necessary?” Victory nudged.

Students talked about their professors, who they felt often dismissed conservative sources as less credible, and their concerns that attacks on disinformation by the government and social media companies were actually a way of thinking policing. “This is a very dangerous precedent,” said Ethan TerHorst, second year student i group policy director.

“So what tools are there to help move things in a positive direction?” – asked victory.

Dykstra, drawing on his experience in clock tower debates with Democrats, concluded that trying to change his colleagues’ minds so close to Election Day was a “waste of time.” Instead, he suggested that College Republicans should start sidelining the campus demographic most likely to support Trump — young men.

He said too many young Trump supporters wrongly believe Harris and Democrats are ahead in the polls and likely to win the presidency in November. “We need to go to them, shake them and let them know that the elections are close,” he said.

Claire Huntley, 20, knocked on dorm room doors on behalf of For Michigan, a group formed in 2024 by recent college graduates and supported by a $730,000 contribution from the Strategic Victory Fund, a large liberal donor network focused on battleground states.

Huntley said she felt angry and betrayed when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. As a sixth-grader, she couldn’t understand how someone could be on tape bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” and still be elected. president. Now a sophomore at Grand Valley, she had learned to expect the worst when it came to American politics.

“I would like to think that things will get better if Harris wins,” she said, “but there will always be a backlash from the other side.”

Her group’s goal during the final two weeks of the election was to knock on the doors of every dorm room on campus at least three times in an attempt to force a vote. Students, like Huntley, would receive $500 for two weeks of work.

To motivate herself, she did some quick calculations in her head. She noted that Michigan has about 420,000 students. In 2016, Trump won the state by only about 10,000 votes. Maybe she changed something?

At each door, Huntley offered candy or a mini pumpkin in exchange for students’ names, email addresses and phone numbers so someone could text them to remind them to vote. In about an hour, she knocked on 30 doors, took over seven phone numbers and registered one student – a Harris supporter from Nashville – to vote in Michigan.

It was especially rewarding to earn student registration points, which is a relative rarity given the large number of voting groups on campus. “This is the kind of door that makes it all worth it,” Huntley said. Grand Valley officials estimate about 90 percent of students are registered to vote.

The next morning, Huntley and four other Grand Valley College Democrats piled into a hatchback and headed to Grand Rapids, about 30 minutes away, for Harris’ first rally of the campaign in western Michigan.

The rally site was a park on a perfect fall day, and the vice president was supported by a wall of bright red maple trees. Huntley listened as Harris outlined her policy priorities – restoring abortion rights, expanding Medicare, revitalizing Michigan’s manufacturing base – and warning – as she did with greater frequency in the final days of the campaign – about the danger Trump posed to American democracy.

“This is not 2016 or 2020,” Harris said. “The stakes are even higher this time.”

“We’re not coming back,” the crowd began chanting, and Huntley joined in.

She and her friends stayed after the speech. “There’s something special about seeing her and the joy coming from the crowd,” Huntley said.

“It was a real treat,” agreed Grand Valley junior Ella Harvey.

“It’s good for my mental health,” Huntley agreed.

The sun glinted off the Grand River and the fall leaves swayed gently in the breeze as they made their way to the car. However, the good feelings did not last long. Huntley’s phone beeped with an automated text message from the Harris campaign warning that they had been “inundated with attack ads.”

Soon the conversation turned to Trump; he vows to act like a “dictator”, if only for one day; his recent threats to use the military against political rivals such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“He’s a malignant narcissist,” Huntley said.

She and her friends got into the car and drove back to campus. There are 17 days left until the elections. Huntley still had hundreds of doors to knock.