When the Candidates Come to Campus
Here’s what six months of college visits show about four leading Democrats.
Backgrounder
Campuses are political spaces. For proof, look to the Democratic primaries for the 2020 presidential election. At universities, candidates have rallied undergraduates, debated policy, and taken selfies, aiming to break through in a crowded field.
The Chronicle tracked campus visits for four leading candidates for six months of this stretch — May 1 through October 31, 2019 — as they campaigned for their party’s nomination. Where they chose to make their case was revealing. (For a full list of stops, click
here.)
Over the six months, the former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and the former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg traveled to a total of 15 states, plus the District of Columbia. All candidates made stops in Iowa, Nevada, D.C., New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas — for individual or fieldwide events.
Biden spoke at campuses in seven states and the District of Columbia, the fewest of the candidates analyzed.
Campuses in 10 states and the District of Columbia hosted Buttigieg. He was the only candidate to visit a campus in Indiana — his home state — or New York, where he got stuck in traffic on his way to a Queens campus.
Sanders was the only candidate to visit a campus in North Carolina, and he stopped at three: a community college, a historically black women’s college, and the state’s flagship.
Warren visited campuses in 12 states and the District of Columbia, the most of the four candidates over the six months analyzed, and she was the only candidate to visit campuses in Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia.
Joe Biden
The former vice president has forcefully argued that he is the candidate best able to beat President Trump in a general election, with policy proposals that skew more moderate than those of Sanders and Warren. Although he has led in many polls in the months leading up to primary elections and caucuses, he has struggled in polling with younger voters.
Biden has stressed his working-class roots to voters, and in one poll he led voters without a four-year degree by significant margins. More than one in five of his visits over the time period tracked by The Chronicle were at community colleges, a higher proportion than that of Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg.
Percent of community-college visits
More than 27 percent of Biden’s campus visits were in counties that Trump won, the highest among the four candidates analyzed.
Percent of visits in Trump-winning counties
Pete Buttigieg
Buttigieg is no stranger to college towns. His former office in South Bend, Ind., where he served as mayor, is mere miles from the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College.
Early in his campaign, Buttigieg captured attention in part because of his elite academic résumé — the Harvard graduate went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. Buttigieg’s campuses were far more likely to be listed as “more selective” by the Carnegie Classification than his competitors’.
Percent of 'more selective' campuses
Buttigieg has struggled in polling with black voters. Less than 10 percent of the campuses at which he spoke were historically black colleges and universities, the lowest percentage of the candidates analyzed. And unlike his competitors, who held individual events at HBCUs, Buttigieg’s two stops at those campuses were at fieldwide events — a debate at Texas Southern University and the Presidential Justice Forum at Benedict College.
Percent of HBCU visits
Bernie Sanders
In 2016, the Vermont senator, a self-described democratic socialist, helped bring free college into the mainstream policy conversation. Today, several of his competitors have introduced policies aimed at reducing the cost of a postsecondary degree.
In 2016, Sanders won more primary votes among voters under 30 than the combined tallies of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, according to Tufts University research. That enthusiasm from younger supporters is reflected in the sheer number of college campuses he visited over six months: 37, the highest of these four candidates.
Number of campus visits
He and Warren, who align on many liberal policies, have supported canceling student debt and making a four-year degree free for students. The median tuition at the campuses at which they spoke is lower than that of the campuses Biden and Buttigieg visited.
Median tuition
Elizabeth Warren
The Massachusetts senator’s CV may well be longer than yours. She’s the candidate most extensively tied to academe: Warren has held academic appointments at campuses including the Rutgers School of Law, the University of Texas School of Law, and Harvard University.
Taken together, less than half of all students attending the colleges Warren visited identified as white. None of her competitors could say the same.
Racial breakdown of campuses
Warren was also the only candidate to visit her alma mater over the six months analyzed. She refers to her time at the University of Houston — where she attended and later taught — often on the campaign trail as she tells her personal story.
Methodology
The Chronicle of Higher Education tracked news clippings, Facebook events, and campaign announcements from May 1, 2019, to October 31, 2019, for instances in which Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders, and Warren appeared on college or university campuses. The Chronicle then reached out to each candidate’s campaign team to fact-check the compiled lists. Every event cited by a campaign appears as part of this analysis; also included were university-located events, even if the campaign did not host the event.
To compile a database, The Chronicle used information on enrollment, student demographics, special focus, and type of institution from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System for the fall of 2017, the most recent semester whose final release numbers were available. Information on tuition was taken from 2018-19 IPEDs data, the most recent held by the database. In-state tuition was used for public colleges and universities.
For two visits, Ipeds data for individual campuses were not available. For Biden’s June 12, 2019, visit to Clinton Community College, The Chronicle used IPEDs data from the college’s district, the Eastern Iowa Community Colleges District. For a June 8, 2019, Sanders visit to Iowa Valley Continuing Education Conference Center, The Chronicle used IPEDs data from Marshalltown Community College, co-located on the campus. Categorization on selectivity was drawn from the Carnegie Foundation. County-level 2016 elections results are courtesy of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
