Polarizing political ads. Heated rhetoric. Election anxiety.

It’s been a long presidential-campaign season.

And colleges and universities have played a role throughout. They’ve hosted presidential debates, served as popular stops on the campaign trail, and been at the center of efforts to get young people to vote. Meanwhile, a college degree has become the dividing line in American politics.

The data below paint a picture of some of the ways that higher education has intersected with the 2020 election, both publicly and behind the scenes.

For students at the University of Georgia, early voting in recent years has meant taking a trip to the student center in the heart of campus. But this fall, the university decided that the possibility of long lines of people indoors during a pandemic would make voting too risky. Officials scrapped on-campus early voting and instead offered to shuttle students to a polling place in downtown Athens, Ga.

UGA Votes, a student-led voting-rights group that had worked to get early voting hosted at the student center, announced the institution’s decision in a statement posted on Twitter at 9:55 a.m. on September 16.

Right away, critics noted that Georgia had found a way to accommodate football games on campus but couldn’t do the same for voting. The university responded, in a tweet sent from its official account at 5:11 p.m., by saying football is played outdoors and the stadium crowds wouldn’t be at full capacity.

But in a state that has been the focus of national battles over voter disenfranchisement, the backlash was effective.

At just after noon the following day, the university tweeted that it was “pleased” to announce that its offer to use Stegeman Coliseum, home of Georgia basketball and gymnastics, had been approved as an early voting site by state and local officials.

UGA Votes reported in a tweet last week that 1,214 people had voted at Stegeman.

Last fall, the University of Michigan proudly announced that it had been selected to host one of three presidential debates before the 2020 election.

But the anticipation was short lived. In June, three months into the global pandemic, Michigan decided that its efforts to bring students safely back to campus in the fall would be compromised by hosting the October 15 debate — now with layers of social-distancing protocols to consider in addition to everything else.

In a twist of events, this debate, which was moved to a performing-arts center in Miami, was ultimately canceled after President Trump was diagnosed with the coronavirus.

About a month after Michigan backed out, the University of Notre Dame did, too. That event, scheduled to be the first debate between Joe Biden and President Trump, was moved to the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic.

For years, students at Prairie View A&M have fought for voting rights in Waller County, Tex., where the historically Black college is located. Their latest lawsuit was filed in October 2018 when, during the first week of early voting in the mid-term elections, there was no early voting site on the campus.

The plaintiffs asked a federal judge to give residents in the majority Black city of Prairie View and the university the same access to early voting as other cities in Waller County, which is mostly white.

The judge has not yet issued a ruling. The students and alumni, all five of whom were students when the latest suit was filed, represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, saw their case go to trial, and closing arguments ended a few weeks before Election Day.

Early voting in Prairie View for the 2020 election was held at a community center a mile away from the campus of more than 9,000 students.

When Biden named Sen. Kamala Harris, the California Democrat and a Howard alum, as his running mate in early August, historically Black colleges and universities everywhere took pride. But the choice sparked the most joy among Howard students and graduates, of course — and thrust the institution into the spotlight.

Google-search interest in the term “Howard University” was at its highest since the beginning of the year during the week in August when the Biden-Harris ticket became official, according to Google Trends data.

On an index of 0-100, a value of 100 is the peak popularity of a term. The week before, Howard University as a search term had a value of 50.

Last year, when campaigning meant traveling to meet potential voters in person, the Democratic candidates for presidents made it a point to stop at college campuses

From May 1 to October 2019, the four leading Democratic presidential candidates at the time — Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor — mixed and mingled with students in 15 states and the District of Columbia between them.

Sanders was the most likely to be found on a college campus during that period. He visited 37 institutions.

For years, Quinnipiac polls have been synonymous with election season. And behind every poll is the work of 11 staff members. But also integral to the operation are students, who reach out to registered voters to get their opinions.

What’s their work like? According to the Poll’s website, interviewers call from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m on weekdays, with additional hours on the weekend. If no one answers, they call back at least four times. Quinnipiac’s polling for the 2020 presidential race began in 2018, said Doug Schwartz, the Poll’s associate vice president and director.

The Poll’s interviewers are a mix of students and nonstudents, all professionally trained and monitored. Great candidates for the job, the Poll’s website says, are Quinnipiac students “interested in learning the art and science of survey research.”