OnOne of the clearest contributors to Trump’s 2024 presidential victory was his newfound support among young voters. Estimates vary, but all agree that, when considered by age, his support grew the most with voters under 30. According to Pew, Trump’s support grew by 4 percentage points among these voters; Catalist put his improvement at 6 points. In Wisconsin, I’ve calculated that Trump’s vote share grew by 3 percentage points in the youngest fifth of the state, while it grew just a single point in every older quintile.

College campus wards offer a useful way to measure a particular slice of the youth vote—students who’ve just entered the electorate. You might expect that Trump’s improvement with young voters was limited to young people who don’t go to college, given the way educational polarization works in the rest of the electorate. But this isn’t what the data show. Trump saw some particularly large gains on certain Wisconsin college campuses.

However, across these campuses, Republican performance has cratered since Trump’s 2024 election. In April 2025, the Republican-endorsed Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel received 13.6% in the same wards that gave Trump 31.2% earlier in the same school year. This was the lowest share of any conservative candidate for President, Governor, or State Supreme Court Justice since at least 2016. Then, in 2026, the Republican endorsee Maria Lazar set a new record low in college campus vote share for a conservative candidate, with 11.6%.

Turnout fell among college voters in these elections. The campus wards made up 0.91% of the electorate in November 2024, dipping to 0.78% in April 2025 and 0.55% in April 2026. This suggests two plausible interpretations of why conservative support fell so much in those elections. One is that many college voters changed their minds and voted for a liberal court candidate after casting a ballot for Trump in 2024.

The other possibility is that Trump’s college supporters simply didn’t turn out for April elections in the same numbers as their liberal peers. Over the past 10 years, high-turnout elections have resulted in better Republican performances in campus wards, both overall and relative to the rest of the state. Republican reliance on low-propensity voters is notorious, but it’s usually attributed to their strength with less-educated citizens who vote less frequently. The patterns on Wisconsin’s college campuses suggest that, even among currently enrolled college students, those with Republican leanings are just less reliable voters than those with Democratic leanings.

The Most and Least Liberal Campuses

The campuses themselves vary a lot in their political disposition. Some match the stereotype of a leafy left-wing enclave, but others are actually proportionally home to more Republican voters than the rest of their host city.

For this analysis, I define campus wards as those where more than half the population was ages 18-22 in the 2020 census.[i] This includes wards corresponding to 12 universities and one college. Three are private and the rest are members of the UW System. Altogether these wards contain about 1.1% of the state’s total population. Because ward boundaries can change over time, I reallocated election results from old ward boundaries into the current ones based on validated voter records.

Taking the average of the past 12 elections for President, Governor, and State Supreme Court Justice, the most liberal campuses are Lawrence University, UW-Madison, and UW-Milwaukee. Trump won between 12% and 22% in these campuses’ wards in 2024. Lazar won 3%-8% in April 2026.

On average, the most conservative campuses are UW-Platteville, UW-Whitewater, and UW-Green Bay. Here, Trump won 39%-47% in 2024 and Lazar 13%-22% in April 2026.

Trump did especially well across many of these campuses, winning 50% of the vote in the wards around UW-La Crosse and more than 40% in the UW campuses at Oshkosh, River Falls, Whitewater, and Platteville.

Several campuses—even some very liberal ones—are home to noticeably more conservatives than the rest of their home municipalities. This shouldn’t be surprising. Many schools draw a wide mix of students from across the state, and those students reflect—at least to some degree—the political diversity of their homes.

A good example of this is the state’s flagship university, UW-Madison. Among conservatives, Madison is a bit of a punchline. Lee Dreyfus called it “30 square miles surrounded by reality” in his 1978 gubernatorial campaign.

In UW-Madison’s campus wards, Trump received 21% of the vote in 2016, 18% in 2020, and 22% in 2024. But in the rest of the City of Madison, Trump received 15%, 14%, and 15%, respectively. There are wards on the east side of Madison’s isthmus where Trump received fewer than 1 in 20 votes in 2024. But across UW-Madison’s student-occupied wards, more than 1 in 5 voted for Trump.

This solid Trump-voting minority on UW-Madison’s campus has done conservatives little good during April Supreme Court elections. Since 2020, Republican-endorsed Justice candidates have never gotten out of the single digits in the campus wards, actually lagging their performance in the rest of the city.

UW-La Crosse also stands out as a place with a noticeable (and growing) town-gown political divide. In La Crosse, the campus wards have grown much more conservative—giving Trump 35% in 2016, 41% in 2020, and 50% in 2024. These wards have always been more conservative than the rest of the city (at least during presidential elections), but the gap has grown from 2 percentage points in 2016 to 14 in 2024.

The town-gown divide runs in the opposite direction in Appleton, home to Lawrence University, a private liberal arts school and the state’s most Democratic campus. Here, Republican voters are less than half as common as in the rest of the city.

Milwaukee is home to two campuses with somewhat different political personalities.

Voters in the UW-Milwaukee campus wards have grown much more Democratic over the past decade, and they are now less Republican than the city as a whole. Trump won 25% in these wards in 2016, dropping to 22% in 2020 and 19% in 2024. Meanwhile, Trump support in the rest of the city grew from 18% to 20% to 21% across his three campaigns.

Apart from April elections, voters in the Marquette campus wards have consistently voted more conservatively than voters in the rest of Milwaukee. In 2024, this gap surged. Trump won 27% in the Marquette wards in 2016, 23% in 2020, and 33% in 2024.

Implications for November 2026

The basic dynamic in Wisconsin politics is that, while there are more Republicans than Democrats, Democrats dominate among the most reliable voters and Republicans depend on turning out people who only sometimes show up in November. This latter group apparently includes a large cohort of conservative-leaning but politically unengaged college students. To the extent that the past few elections hold any lessons, they might be this: potential conservative voters exist in meaningful numbers on Wisconsin’s college campuses, but Republicans face an uphill battle turning them out.

[i] The census is officially conducted on April 1. By that date in 2020 many college students had been sent home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the Census Bureau went to considerable effort to count these students where they would’ve been under normal circumstances.

Wisconsin votes a lot. I mean that in two ways: voter turnout is often high and opportunities to vote arrive frequently. In 2024, the state’s voter turnout was the highest in the nation (76.66% of eligible voters). And statewide elections occur almost every year, often more than once. The total number of voters participating in these contests routinely varies by millions, with inescapable consequences for the parties. With maximum turnout, Republicans enjoy a slight edge, but Democrats have opened a seemingly insurmountable advantage in lower-turnout contests.

For the purposes of this analysis, I’m interested in statewide elections when Democrats, or Democratic-endorsed nonpartisan candidates, ran against Republicans, or their endorsees. This includes November general elections, April elections for State Supreme Court Justice or State Superintendent, and February primaries for those same offices. Unlike in partisan primaries, when Democrats and Republicans vote in separate contests, nonpartisan Wisconsin primaries occur only when at least three candidates are on the ballot, and the top two vote-getters both advance to the April general.

These days, the nonpartisan status of statewide April (and February) elections is just a formality. The parties endorse and fund their preferred candidates, and the voters are well aware of even these unofficial candidate affiliations. The correlation between the vote for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice and the previous presidential election grew from 0.002 in 1978 to 0.99 by 2025.

Since 2020, there have been 11 statewide elections pitting Democrats against Republicans, counting formally nonpartisan races in which the party affiliation of the candidates was clear.

Those elections ranged in turnout from 3.4 million in the November 2024 presidential election to 326 thousand during the February 2021 primary for State Superintendent.

At the Marquette Law School Poll, we draw most of each sample from the list of registered voters in the state, so for those voters, we can see their actual voting history—not who they voted for but if they voted in each election. I identified everyone we’ve interviewed who remained registered to vote in Wisconsin throughout this entire period, 2020–2026. This includes about 78% of current registered voters in the state and 8,275 respondents to our polls.

I used those respondents to measure the party split among voters at every level of engagement, shown in the graph below.

Republicans enjoy a strong advantage in party ID among those who voted in 7 or fewer of the 11 elections for which they were registered. For instance, about 10% of registered voters voted in only 3 elections, most commonly the three November contests during this period. Among these 3-time voters, our poll finds that 50% identify as Republican, 31% Democratic, and 19% Independent.

Democrats have the advantage with those who voted in 8 or more elections, and the advantage grows steadily with frequency of voting. About 5% of these registered voters had a 100% participation rate; among them, 55% were Democrats, 36% Republicans, and just 9% Independents.

Independents are far less likely to vote frequently. These are “pure” Independents who deny leaning toward either party. Among registered voters who vote the least, more than a fifth are pure Independents. That is more than twice the rate of Independents among high frequency voters.

This means that, as the electorate shrinks, it also becomes more predictable and more ideologically extreme. Among those who voted in two or fewer elections—prototypically, someone who only votes for president, if that—45% describe themselves as moderate, 8% very conservative, and 8% very liberal. Contrast that with the ideology of those who voted all 11 times. Just 20% describe themselves as moderate, 15% very conservative, and 26% very liberal.

In other words, during a high-turnout presidential election, the last voters to be convinced to vote often reject both parties along with the terms “liberal” and “conservative.” A successful politician must appeal to these voters to win in Wisconsin. However, in a low-turnout April election, about 90% of the participants identify with one of the parties and few see themselves as “moderate.” Candidates in these elections play to their respective bases because there is little audience for doing anything else.

Of course, knowing turnout alone can only tell you so much. The qualities of the candidates, the national environment, and other dynamics of the race play a role. But the importance of turnout to shaping the outcome can’t be denied. There were 17 individual contests in the 11 statewide elections from 2020 through April 2026. Here are the results of each of those, compared with the total number of voters in each.

Overall, Republican vote share increases with the size of the electorate. It’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s 2024 victory coincided with record-breaking turnout in the state.

In general, Republicans remain quite competitive whenever turnout is above 2.5 million. They also won the State Treasurer and U.S. Senator races in 2022. However, no Republican or Republican-endorsed candidate has come within 5 points of victory this decade in a race with turnout below 2.5 million.

Things are particularly dire for Republicans in State Superintendent primaries, when voter turnout can fall below half a million. In 2021 and 2025, multiple Democratic-aligned candidates ran, receiving about two-thirds of the vote combined. Although the single Republican-endorsed candidate in those races still managed to advance to the general election, it’s conceivable that a future February primary could result in two Democratic-aligned State Superintendent candidates advancing to the general.

Given the way that low turnout now works to the benefit of Democrats while Republicans need high turnout to win, it may appear surprising that Democrats remain the party promoting voting access while Republicans pursue efforts that would shrink the electorate. It can seem as if each party is accidentally working to make things better for the other. A few long-standing political beliefs contribute. Many Democrats believe that higher turnout is normatively good, and the Obama-era mindset that “When everyone votes, we win” is still common. Likewise, I suspect many Republicans still believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the marginal voter is more likely to vote for a Democrat than a Republican.