ANN ARBOR, Mich. — On Monday, the Harris campaign opened a new campaign office in Ann Arbor, home to the world-renowned University of Michigan. The heavily blue, affluent city with a large student population is a major zone of activity for Democratic electoral strategy.
Around the clock, individuals with clipboards walk around the campus, hoping to register young, overwhelmingly Democrat-leaning college students to vote in Michigan’s hotly contested elections.
Another practically permanent fixture of the university’s open lawn, known as “the Diag,” is a table run by the super PAC NextGen America, where activists offer to help students register to vote, with Taylor Swift-inspired friendship bracelets as a reward.
Alaina Smith is a grad student in Environmental Science from South Berwick, Maine. She says the Diag has always been a center of political activism, especially with last school year’s anti-Israel protests.
“There’s a long history of women’s rights, of civil rights, of minority rights being supported. This past year it was not supported by the university. There was an encampment for the support of Palestine, and that was not supported by the university. And the university continues to employ security to prevent the organization based on political beliefs in the Diag.”
The organization NextGen America offers to help students register to vote by their method of choice: early voting, absentee ballot, or in-person.
Founded by billionaire ex-presidential candidate Tom Steyer, NextGen deploys its foot soldiers to campus, where they hand out forms for students to sign, where they can indicate their support of issues like the “climate crisis” or “racial and immigrant justice.”
The activists running NextGen America’s table refused to take questions from The Post as they canvassed the Diag.
According to a Michigan Daily survey conducted in 2020, more than 75% of University of Michigan students described themselves as “somewhat liberal” or “very liberal.”
U-M students number 50,000 strong, and about half of their undergrads — 16,000 last year — hail from out of state. So when August comes, so too do a bounty of new potential progressive voters to this battleground state each year.
And left-wing voter registration groups are seizing on that golden opportunity.
Grad student Alaina Smith told The Post that these groups often approach her on the Diag.
“I have been asked multiple times,” said Smith. “And I do inform them that I still vote in my hometown. I have vested interests and I’m more aware and educated on the issues in my own home state. I just feel like a more informed voter in Maine.”
Describing the strategy of the voter registration orgs, Smith said: “I would say they pick high traffic days. Fridays is a big one or any day that they know there’s other events also happening on campus.”
One of the registration agents walking around campus with a clipboard told The Post that he works for a group called Forward Majority, bringing completed voter registration forms from the campus to the local clerk.
According to its website, the super PAC Forward Majority takes “an aggressive strategy to secure critical footholds of power for Democrats.” Two former Democratic campaign staffers named David Cohen and Vicky Hausman lead the organization.
FEC filings reveal that Forward Majority receives millions from left-wing foundations and major investment firms.
So far this election cycle, the organization has received $200,000 from individuals associated with the Soros Fund and over $2 million from Stephen Mandel, the founder of Connecticut-based hedge fund Lone Pine Capital.
The organization boasts of flipping 73 seats in GOP-controlled legislatures across ten states, plus collecting another 100,000 voter registrations in “frontline geographies where state legislative majorities are won or lost.”
Washtenaw County Clerk Lawrence Kestenbaum explains that, due to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, these highly partisan voter registration efforts are completely legal.
“It used to be before the National Voter Registration Act, that in Michigan, in order to do a voter registration drive, you had to have your volunteers, the people who were contacting voters to be trained and deputized by the local clerk. And while they were doing this, they couldn’t do anything partisan,” Kestenbaum told The Post.
“But the National Voter Registration Act flipped that completely, because now there’s a federal form, and you can be just as partisan as you want passing these around.”
According to Kestenbaum, it is a simple process for an out-of-state student to register to vote in Michigan.
“If someone is living here or they’re present here, if they want to be a Michigan voter, in general, if they’re a US citizen and so on, they can be,” he said.
Ann Arbor is certainly a heavily Democratic-leaning city in a Democratic-leaning county, but increasing turnout in this area is essential to the Democratic strategy in the state.
In 2020, for example, Donald Trump gained almost 400,000 more voters than when he won the state in 2016, yet failed to defeat Joe Biden, who gained around 540,000 more votes in Michigan than Clinton did in the previous cycle.
Forward Majority appears confident that aggressive voter registration efforts are the path to victory in tight races.
“Forward Majority’s groundbreaking Battleground Voter Project aims to register 200,000 untapped suburban voters in the 2024 election cycle,” the org’s website reads.
