Did students at UC Merced help flip a San Joaquin Valley Congressional district?

The Merced FOCUS reviewed election numbers from Congressional District 13, and the results show the precinct that contains UC Merced pulled in 337 more votes for Gray than Duarte. That is a larger margin than the 187 votes which ultimately helped Gray win the race, and narrowly edge out Republican incumbent John Duarte.

Melvin Levey, the registrar of voters for Merced County, told The Merced FOCUS that, anecdotally, he’s not surprised. On Election Day, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, the polling station closest to the UC campus, had a line that wrapped around the parking lot.

“The line was so long that it took more than three hours to finish serving all of the voters that were already in line at 8 p.m. and presumably many of those folks were UC [Merced] students,” Levey said.

Voting numbers show that precinct, in particular, pulled in 396 votes for Gray, with 267 being conditional or provisional ballot holders. Duarte pulled in 59 votes in the precinct overall, of which 47 were provisional or conditional ballots. Gray also received 74 mail-in ballots to Duarte’s nine in the precinct.

When a ballot is conditional, it usually means the voter registered to vote on Election Day.

Levey said that out of about 83,000 votes cast in Merced county, just over 2,400 were either conditional or provisional. Another way to look at it: provisional and conditional ballots played a big role in deciding races like the one for the 13th Congressional District.

Related Story: How Democrat Adam Gray Won His Race, the Last to Be Called in the US House

Students Active in General Elections

Blake Zante, executive director of the Maddy Institute at Fresno State, said students are generally civically-engaged during high-stakes presidential elections.

“When you have a presidential election, there’s a lot of political activism on both sides,” Zante said. “You see young Republicans, [and] young Democrats, really trying to turn out students to vote for one candidate or the other.”

Zante said when students relocate to the university and change their voting location, it can also influence results. At UC Merced, most students are from outside the county. This semester, for example, only 32% of incoming freshmen were even from central California.

Same-day registration is often a convenient way for students who are from outside of the area to vote. Katie Brokaw, a professor of literature and theater at UC Merced, said students are also busy, which influences their voting behavior.

Related Story: Unlikely Battleground California Crucially Influences US House’s ...

“As someone who is, at the moment, grading a lot of projects that I assigned in August that were due last week and we’re turned in at midnight, I think that a lot of students tend to do things last minute,” Brokaw said. “I also think there’s something that’s exciting about Election Day itself, right? That sort of feeling that like ‘today’s the day.’”

But Zante also points to the mere presence of a UC campus in an otherwise red or purple region of California.

“Anytime you have a major academic institution, it definitely has an influence on the political dynamics,” Zante said. “It goes just beyond the students. You have staff, you have faculty, people who work around the university. You have industries that are created and businesses that are created around the university as well.”

District 13 also has many young voters. Zante said he expects to see the region mirror the politics of young people in future elections.

“(UC Merced) may have been viewed as this far-off land previously, but I think that as development occurs, and as the city grows out toward the university, we’ll definitely see certain political dynamics emerge as a result,” he said.

About the Author

Rachel Livinal is the Higher Education Reporter for The Merced FOCUS.