Students, booming suburbs swung Hays vote to Democrats

Austin-American Statesmen, Phillip Jankowski:

Catherine Wicker had to go about registering Texas State University voters much differently this year.

Typical get-out-the-vote events were out the window with the coronavirus pandemic. Outside organizations were prohibited from holding voter registration events on campus.

Wicker, a graduate student in public administration, said her efforts with the national nonpartisan organization Campus Vote Project had to evolve. Passing around clipboards wouldn’t work. Sharing pens was too risky.

But an even greater challenge was finding where to meet her fellow Bobcats while many of the university’s 37,849 students attended classes remotely.

“Taking voter registration to them was a lot of what we did this cycle,” Wicker said of the effort, which included going farther out into the community than just the campus. Volunteers set up where they knew many students work, such as San Marcos Premium Outlets. They headed into apartment complexes known to have heavy concentrations of students.

Read the full article here.