When the Michigan State University College Democrats held their weekly meetings last spring at a sprawling residential hall on campus, organizers were lucky if they could get more than 30 students to show up.
There was little enthusiasm for President Biden, the presumptive nominee whom many students regarded as too old. Laticia Martinez, a junior who is the group’s vice president, said she ultimately would have supported Mr. Biden but felt a sense of “guilt” when weighing her choices.
“I didn’t want to not vote, but it’s so hard to get behind someone who I really just didn’t feel was speaking for me,” she said. “Pretty much at that point, it was the lesser of two evils.”
But the club’s first meeting of the semester this fall drew nearly 200 students, reflecting what undergraduates say has been a surge in Democratic enthusiasm on campus since Mr. Biden dropped out and Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee. Now Democratic candidates up and down the ticket in Michigan are hoping to capitalize on that shift to bolster their bids.
Congressional campaigns rarely put much effort into courting college students, known for being unreliable, poorly informed voters. But at Michigan State this year, the campus’s student body of 50,000 is at the epicenter of three exceedingly tight races — presidential, Senate and House — that could be decided by just a few thousand votes.
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