Could young voters in Michigan hand the state to Kamala Harris?

So few students wanted to join the campus Republican party when Abigail Sefcik began studying at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU) that she was rapidly voted in as its president.

“The group was only four or five people. Nobody else wanted to do it,” she said.

Four years later, Sefcik has turned her back on the Republicans and is supporting Kamala Harris for president.

“In 2020, I voted for Donald Trump. I was being sucked into his void and I said some really disparaging things about other people. I did some things that I would just really call shameful when I think of them,” said the political science student in her final year at university.

“But after a couple of years, I decided that there wasn’t a lot that the Republicans stood for that I really cared about.”

Rejecting Trump and the Republicans was one thing, but Sefcik found little to inspire her in Joe Biden’s run for re-election. Then the president dropped out the race in July and Harris rapidly became the de facto Democratic candidate.

“I couldn’t identify with Joe Biden as a good leader. When we were looking at a ticket with Biden and Trump, of course I was going to vote for Biden. But I would do so unwillingly because we know what the alternative would be,” she said.

“Kamala Harris provides a way out for a lot of voters. Her youth, for one thing, has inspired a lot of young people.”

A recent Harvard Kennedy School poll gives Harris a two-to-one lead over Trump among voters aged 18 to 29. Harris has the support of 64% of younger voters to 32% for Trump principally because of significantly higher approval ratings on the issues of the climate crisis, abortion rights and healthcare. Harris also scores much better with younger voters on empathy, reliability and honesty.

Kamala Harris in Michigan on 4 October 2024. Photograph: Andrew Roth/Rex/Shutterstock

The Kennedy School polling director, John Della Volpe, said the findings showed “a significant shift in the overall vibe and preferences of young Americans” in favour of Harris compared with Biden.

“In just a few weeks, Vice-President Harris has drummed up a wave of enthusiasm among young voters. The shift we are seeing toward Harris is seismic, driven largely by young women,” he said.

The challenge for the Harris campaign is to translate that enthusiasm into votes where it matters.

SVSU is one such place. The university has about 7,000 students. The vast majority can vote in Michigan, a battleground state that Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016.

With polls showing the former president and Harris closely tied in Michigan, student votes potentially carry significant weight in a state that the vice-president’s campaign sees as a key part of her clearest path to victory alongside two other Rust belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Leah Craig is campaigning for Harris on campus and registering her fellow students to vote. She did not volunteer for Biden’s campaign even though she would have voted for him. But Harris prompted Craig to get involved.

“It was reinvigorating, to say the least. When Biden was the candidate, I wasn’t really passionate about it and it just felt like I was going into another election of the-lesser-of-two-evils kind of a thing. But the Harris campaign brought a new level of attention to a lot of issues that people of my generation are really passionate about,” she said.

“We now have an easier candidate to embrace, an easier candidate to advocate for, an easier candidate to appeal to young people.”

Many students at SVSU talk about Harris’s relative youth. Although at 59 she is old enough to be a grandmother to the students, they see a sharp contrast in energy and spirit compared with Biden and Trump. Noah Johnson, president of the SVSU Democrats, also credits a determined social media campaign for drawing in younger voters.

“A lot of it is due to a big initial social media push. I saw it definitely resonate with some people, like Charli xcx when she tweeted out the Kamala brat thing. That was effective with young people. And similarly, like the coconut tree meme,” he said.

“It’s like a permission structure. It wasn’t cool or popular to be a fan of Biden. Students were like: ‘Sure, I support his policies.’ But it was very rare to find a young person that was actively a fan of him. It was more: ‘I’ll vote for him, especially because I like him more than Trump.’ But I’ve definitely seen, especially from my less politically engaged friends, they’re actively excited to go out and vote for Kamala even if they’re not doing anything else.”

Still, the Harvard youth poll found a significant gender gap, with the vice-president garnering 17% more support among young female voters than those who are male, although a majority of young men say they will vote for Harris. Sefcik said she saw that at SVSU, where the small membership of the campus Republican party is mostly male while a majority of the college Democrats are women.

Trump held a rally at SVSU last week but said little to directly address younger voters or their concerns, perhaps because relatively few students attended and the former president failed to fill the 4,000-seat sports hall.

A student who did attend and said he supported Trump didn’t want to give his name. Asked why not, he replied: “There’s no problem at SVSU. I feel like people are respectful of each other’s views. I have friends on both sides. But it’s not like that outside. Saying you vote for Trump could cost you a job.”

Many of SVSU’s students come from rural and small-town Michigan, and grew up in Republican neighbourhoods and homes. Sefcik’s disillusionment with Trump went hand in hand with questioning her upbringing in a religious and politically conservative family. But she also became more dismayed with the Republican party as she experienced it from the inside.

Sefcik said that as president of the campus Republicans, she would attend fundraising events where the donors expected to hear how she was suffering at the hands of “woke” students and liberal professors.

“They want to hear about how hard it is to be a conservative college student and how the system is just not benefiting you anymore. And so you sort of learn these two or three talking points to reinforce that. But in my experience, it wasn’t hard, because people who identified as Democrats were kind and most welcoming people I ever met,” she said.

The SVSU Republicans declined a request for an interview.

Two days after Trump’s rally, a different student crowd turned out to hear Bernie Sanders speak in support of Harris on the campus.

Sanders hit all the right notes for a young audience. Abortion rights, the housing crisis, the US moving ever closer to becoming an oligarchy. He gave a discourse on the dangers of electing Trump again, warning that if he is returned to the White House the world will have “lost the struggle” against the climate crisis.

But Sanders also illustrated the gap with Harris as he called for universal public healthcare – “Medicare for all” – in contrast with her much weaker proposals for drug price controls and greater regulation of medical providers.

Some of Harris’s more active supporters on campus say that she falls short on some policies but they see other strengths. Although Harris has avoided putting her race and gender at the fore of her campaign, Craig said it was important to some students.

“From what I’ve observed around campus, it makes people of our demographic feel more heard and seen and that’s a really big thing, too,” she said.

Several students see Harris as a break with being raised in an age of apprehension. Sefcik said people her age “grew up with the fear after 9/11 and have never known a world where we were sort of safe”. She said Trump exacerbated that with his attacks on minority groups and by packing the supreme court to strip women of control over their bodies.

Craig described students who recently began at university as spending their teenage years living in the “Trump era of American carnage”.

“This is all they’ve ever known. The Biden years are pretty much scrambling to undo what had been done and fix things. I feel like there’s a certain level of despondency whereas, as Harris herself said, she is about bringing joy to people, making it a little more positive and upbeat as compared to the same old. It’s a new approach,” she said.

Still, the challenge of making sure students actually vote remains. There are reasons for the Democrats to be optimistic on that score. Four years ago, a historic high of 66% of American college students voted in the presidential election, a huge leap from 2016, when just 52% turned out.

The Institute for Democracy & Higher Education called the increase “stunning” and attributed it to a range of factors, including student activism on “racial injustice, global climate change, and voter suppression”. Revulsion with Trump also drove a lot of people to the polls.

Harris’s supporters also note that nearly half of SVSU students voted in large numbers in the midterms two years ago, just months after the US supreme court threw out the constitutional right to an abortion by overturning Roe v Wade – a larger turnout than in the rest of Saginaw county.

Craig is pushing a widely heard message among Democrats that Trump’s victory in Michigan in 2016 by 10,704 votes is equivalent to just two ballots in each of the state’s election precincts.

“We are telling them, all it takes is taking a couple of people with you. Talk to your friends, reach out on social media. You don’t have to go knocking door to door, you don’t have to be standing out here with a clipboard. You don’t have to go do anything terribly crazy. You just have to get two people to vote,” she said.