A little over a year ago, I wrote on the topic of college students and local elections. I included some data from local elections in Iowa City, specifically our city council elections in 2017 and 2018. The data provide support for the idea that college students don’t vote in local elections, and I argued the reason for this is that local elections don’t speak to their issues and material interests. In effect, they’ve got nothing at stake.
But this was just from a couple of data points. To compound the difficulties, one of the two data points was a primary for a special election. We’ve got more data now. This time from the November 2019 city council general election in Iowa City.
Let’s take a look!
Iowa City Council 2017-2018
Here’s the recap. We’ve got 24 precincts in Iowa City for our local elections. 4 of them have a heavy concentration of college students: IC-03, IC-05, IC-11, and IC-19. Is everyone in those 4 precincts a college student? No. Are there college students scattered throughout the other 20 precincts? Yes. But this is where we find the heaviest concentration.
Here’s what voter turnout looked like in the November 2017 city council election, comparing the 4 student precincts to the 20 non-student precincts.
And here’s the same comparison from the 2018 special primary.
Note: All data can be found with the Johnson County, Iowa Auditor’s Office.
The upshot? Students vote at very low rates. Probably 1-2%. Possibly lower, depending on the precise composition of those precincts. Even the 1-2% turnout might be mostly from the few non-students who live there.
Iowa City Council 2019
Here’s the new data. I ran the same comparison for the November 2019 city council election.
The difference? Not much! Non-student precincts always outvote student precincts. By 8:1 to 2017, 10:1 in 2018, and then 6:1 in 2019. What differences exist were more the product of variation in non-student precinct turnout than in student precinct turnout. Student turnout remained consistently low through the three cycles. While non-student turnout ranged from about 10% to about 18%, student turnout remained 1-2%.
Local Elections and Solutions
My diagnosis and solutions remain the same. Increasing student turnout in local elections requires speaking directly to student issues and student material interests. And I’m not talking about lofty generational issues national campaigns tend to emphasize. I’m talking about issues in the practical reality of students now and on a local level. In Iowa City, students are hit hard by predatory landlords, rising housing prices, poor utilities services (including Internet), sexual harassment and assault, overpolicing, racism, and other issues. City campaigns and city services sometimes address these issues, but almost always targeted at non-student community members.
I think the data support the view that merely putting a student on the ballot, or using other symbolic gestures, is unlikely to do much work. There was a student on the ballot in both 2017 and 2018 (the same student), but not in 2019. This had no impact on turnout. The student lost respectably in 2017 and badly in 2018, but these differences didn’t impact turnout either. In theory, a better student campaign might increase turnout, but I have my doubts.
Bonus: Ames City Council
So, I think these conclusions from Iowa City probably generalize to other college towns. And I gave Ames as an example. My fellow Iowans might point out that an Iowa State University student recently won a seat on the Ames City Council! Rachel Junck, a 20-year old chemical engineering student, defeated a city council incumbent.
Doesn’t that counter my claim that more symbolic issues like student representation aren’t sufficient to increase student turnout? Doesn’t it show evidence that running a good student candidate could work?
As best I can tell, it doesn’t. Junck defeated the incumbent in a December runoff election with 10% turnout. This suggests to me Junck’s victory probably wasn’t due to sharp increases in student turnout. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about the Ames neighborhoods and precincts. Certainly not enough to tell you where students and non-students live. I’d invite someone more familiar with Ames to run an analysis similar to the one I’ve done here. Let me know if you find that student turnout sharply increased in the December runoff! Given the overall very low turnout numbers, I’m more inclined to attribute Junck’s win to low turnout plus the unpopularity of the incumbent rather than to anything about the student vote.
However, one thing worth noting is that Junck did particularly well in absentee balloting. In fact, she narrowly lost the election day vote, but stomped the incumbent by a 3:1 vote in absentee balloting. It’s possible the absentee vote represents a sharp increase in student turnout, and this is something worth investigating. That said, in the absence of such an investigation, I still think the evidence here points to student turnout in Ames being about as low as it is in Iowa City.
But I could be wrong on this point.
