Unger is co-founder and executive director of the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition. Rin directs the Student PIRGs New Voters Project.
According to all available evidence, youth and college student voters turned out in force this election cycle, making a decisive impact on the 2022 midterms. While those results exceeded public expectations, they came as no surprise to organizers who work closely with the youth vote – especially those on college campuses, where the story of the student vote may offer a roadmap to strengthening democratic participation across the board.
After decades of underperformance, by any objective measure, college student voter turnout exploded over the 2018 and 2020 federal election cycles, significantly outpacing turnout growth among the overall electorate – and they appear to have sustained high turnout levels in 2022. Student voters achieved this new normal despite often facing logistical obstacles due to complicated housing situations, psychological obstacles as first-time voters, and systemic barriers due to policies that seek to block or dilute their vote – not to mention the unprecedented circumstances brought on by the continued Covid-19 pandemic.
We’ve spent much of our careers working to grow the college student vote, and supporting youth voter engagement on both the local and national levels. We can say with confidence that this level of accelerated growth in voter participation could not have happened without sustained engagement through a local-first, nonpartisan approach that focused resources on grassroots efforts to engage voters in their communities and on their terms, with national organizations playing a crucial role of support and coordination.
At the local level we’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds, of stories like the one co-author Manny Rin worked on first-hand as a local organizer in Southern California, where in 2014, prior to the formation of the nonpartisan student voting coalition BruinsVote, the University of California, Los Angeles’ student body voted at a 13.6 percent rate. Over the next several years, BruinsVote, led by campus faculty, student government, and local CALPIRG -affiliated student leaders, coordinated an effort to reach every UCLA student with resources and information about voting.
While student organizations, led by CALPIRG’s New Voters Project, registered and educated thousands of students in the classroom, in the dorms, over the phone, and at on-campus events, UCLA Student Affairs administrators made sure voter registration resources were made easily available online by integrating it into their website and sending emails that reached every student on campus. In the 2018 elections, 44.5 percent of UCLA’s students voted, more than tripling its 2014 voting rate. In 2020, 76.5 percent of UCLA’s students voted.
During that same timespan a network of national organizations got to work ensuring local efforts have the resources, knowledge, connections and institutional backing to sustain gains like those made by UCLA. One such example is ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge’s Presidents’ Commitment, a pledge signed by 537 college presidents, including UCLA’s, to achieve full student voter registration and voter participation of eligible students in all elections – and saw a 5.7 percent average increase in voting rates among participating campuses.
Importantly, both the local and national programs are nonpartisan, which enables organizers to speak to everyone in their communities and maintain credibility that their work is done to help members exercise their voice rather than dictate what they have to say – such as in the case of the 289 schools that participate in Ask Every Student, the national program that seeks to help schools achieve 100 percdent voter registration by asking every student to participate in elections in a 1-on-1 or small-group setting, and has made a measurable impact on student voting.
Nonpartisanship also paves the way for college student vote leaders to leverage the unique ability of a college setting to spark movement and celebration in their communities by rallying everyone – regardless of political persuasion – to a common cause. This fall, for example, more than 600 campuses participated in Campus Takeover by hosting celebrations for the Civic Holidays (National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 20, National Voter Education Week on Oct. 3-7 and Vote Early Day on Oct. 28), national voting-focused mobilizations that saw college campuses host everything from parties with DJ’s on campus to carnival-like gatherings with stilt-walkers and lawn games, to marches to the polls with costume themes.
In other words, today’s students have access to significantly more institutional support, more resources, and more cultural touchpoints that promote voter participation than they did a decade ago. They no longer live in circumstances where voting is just a possibility – it’s an expectation. And those touchpoints and expectations are conveyed to them through channels that lie outside the often-polarizing arena of partisan politics. This has helped improve turnout rates in recent elections and explains, in part, the high youth voter impact on the 2022 midterms.
Duplicating the exact steps taken to get here wouldn’t work with the broader electorate – obviously. But understanding the principles at play – empowering local leaders, offering institutional support, ensuring inclusivity through nonpartisanship, and leveraging cultural norms to make voting a positive, even fun, community touchpoint – can be instructive in helping other underrepresented parts of the electorate make similar gains, and are areas in which higher education leaders can play a prominent role.
An important first step in this process is to acknowledge the successes of the youth and college student vote for the achievement that it is, and not simply a biennial surprise. Their gains are intentional, sustainable and predictable – even if conventional political wisdom is still catching on to this new normal. The sooner we understand the forces creating this positive change, the sooner we can use them as a roadmap to build a more inclusive and equitable democracy for everyone.
Demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Luz Angela Nuñez with her daughter Aisha Quershi Nuñez at their home in College Point, Queens. Photo: Mia Anzalone for Documented.
Kimberly Alvarez, 25, with her daughter Evangeline and her husband John Alvarez in Medellin, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Alvarez.Alvarez arrived in New York City in February 2024 with her husband John Alvarez as asylum seekers from Venezuela. In April 2025, Alvarez found out she was pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her first reaction, she said, was fear.“How am I going to keep her alive?” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. ‘How am I going to be able to take care of her?’”At the beginning of Alvarez’s pregnancy, she said she was aware of the immigration enforcement occurring around the country, but vowed not to let it deter her from showing up to her doctor’s appointments.“When you went out, you were always on alert because you didn’t know if [ICE] might be around. I never saw anything suspicious,” Alvarez said. “But of course, you feel scared.”In October, when Alvarez was six months pregnant, her husband was detained by ICE agents at 26 Federal Plaza. When the immediate shock wore off, she obsessively checked the Online Detainee Locator System to find out where her husband went. A day later, she discovered that he was being kept at Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Alvarez quickly set up an account to pay for phone calls, and every two days, she would pay about $10 for a one-hour call, updating her husband about the baby, her appointments and how she was doing.“Crying was the only way for me to release the tension,” said Alvarez, who worried that her lack of sleep and bad diet were impacting her baby. “Crying was the only way for me to release the tension.”—Kimberly AlvarezThat tension built up day by day, week by week following her husband’s arrest. Alvarez had stopped her work as a cleaner in the neighborhood’s synagogues two weeks before her husband’s detention because of her pregnancy. The plan, she said, was to rely solely on his income as a maintenance worker for “the food, the rent, everything.” Left with few choices, Kimberley had to rely on her mother’s income as a cleaner. The older woman had moved to New York from North Carolina to assist with Alvarez’s pregnancy. “I feel like I’m supposed to help my mom, not the other way around,” Alvarez said. “I felt powerless because I couldn’t do anything.”On Dec. 9, Alvarez gave birth to a daughter, Evangeline. While her baby was healthy, Alvarez’s anxieties did not go away. While she returned to cleaning synagogues a few months after Evangeline’s birth to help make ends meet, Alvarez and her daughter rarely left home. Alvarez said she felt paralyzed, getting frequent alerts from a neighborhood WhatsApp group when ICE was spotted nearby. One day, she said, ICE arrested her friend’s husband in Sunset Park, in an area where she would sometimes take Evangeline for walks.“I’m so afraid that I’ll go out and run into one of them and that they’ll take her away from me,” Alvarez said. “That’s my biggest fear, that someone will take her away from me and I won’t know where my daughter is.”In March, her husband decided to voluntarily remove himself from the United States and move back to Colombia, where he is originally from. It was a family decision, but it was not a happy one — hiring immigration lawyers was too expensive, Alvarez said, adding that staying in the U.S. felt too uncertain. 
