Gallatin, which serves as a gateway to Yellowstone National Park, has nearly doubled in population since 2000, fueled by rising enrollment at the university, out-of-state migrants and the emergence of Bozeman as a technology hub. And over that period, it’s gone from a 59-31 Bush county to a 52-45 Biden county. Between Gallatin’s boom and Missoula’s more modest growth, the two Democratic beachheads now account for roughly a quarter of the statewide vote — up from about 20 percent in 2000. Many of the new migrants to Bozeman are Californians. But they are also moving in from the Denver suburbs and from big cities across the West — Seattle’s King County, Phoenix’s Maricopa County and Las Vegas’ Clark County.
For Democrats, Gallatin’s growth is subject to the law of unintended consequences. While Bozeman still retains its mountain college town feel, it’s taken on the trappings of an Aspen or a Park City. Housing prices have skyrocketed —
the median sales price for a single-family home doubled from $400,000 to $800,000 just since 2017. It’s now experiencing a housing affordability crisis, amplified by a post-pandemic surge in demand thanks to an influx of wealthy out-of-staters, many of whom lean conservative, says Democratic state Rep. Kelly Kortum.
“I’ll never own a house in Bozeman. Not unless I get some kind of crazy promotion,” Kortum laments. “The housing prices have tripled in the last 10 years. The pandemic exacerbated that by driving a lot of fresh retirees to retire in Montana.”
As Bozeman grapples with its housing crisis, Flathead County, a Republican stronghold near Glacier National Park, has drawn an influx of more conservative newcomers in recent years, recently overtaking Gallatin as the fastest-growing county in Montana. While there’s no significant college presence in the county, at the rate it’s growing it could surpass Missoula and Gallatin counties in population by the end of the decade.
“Bozeman is blue,” says Julia Shaida, the Gallatin County Democratic Party chair, “if you can afford to live here.”
‘Ever Greater Turnout, Producing Ever Greater Margins’
Growth is politically meaningless if new residents don’t become voters. In college towns, the get-out-the-vote efforts have converted newcomers into electoral muscle.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the fastest-growing county in Wisconsin.
Between 2010 and 2020, Dane County grew by 15 percent, adding close to 75,000 new residents. It didn’t take long for the political implications of that surge to become apparent. Between 2016 and 2020, the county’s raw vote grew by 11 percent and Democratic performance began ratcheting upward in statewide races. Even with the GOP’s pronounced recent gains in rural Wisconsin, if Dane County voters continue to turn out at exceptionally high levels and continue to deliver landslide Democratic margins, Wisconsin’s days of being a swing state are numbered.
The superpower of Dane County is ever greater population with ever greater turnout producing ever greater margins,” says Ben Wikler, the chair of the state Democratic Party. “Dane County turnout helps create a buffer against potential growth in Republican turnout elsewhere in the state.”
And Dane County has one of the nation’s most effective local party organizations. “It’s not a very sexy story. It’s a lot of hard work that we’re doing over a long period of time,” says Alexia Sabor, Dane County Democratic chair.
“The county party helps to organize a network of 20 neighborhood grassroots action teams. We fund them, we provide them with offices during election seasons, we give them money for websites, Mailchimp [an email marketing platform], volunteer recruitment events, volunteer thank-you events, whatever supplies they need — paper, printers, lighting — to run their team,” Sabor says. “We’re doing this every month of the year, whether or not there’s a big election coming. And we’ve been doing it for the last five years.”
In an interview at a Madison pub, Sabor radiates focus and intensity as she talks about the nuts and bolts of campaigning. She and other local party members fully recognize statewide elections now hinge on a turbocharged local performance, one that delivers votes not only from the deep blue precincts of Madison but also from the smaller and more politically competitive suburban cities, towns and villages that surround it.
She notes matter-of-factly that other county Democratic parties had spring galas several weeks before the spring court election. No one in Dane was getting distracted by or dressed up for a fancy fundraising dinner.
“There’s no way my board members, if I would even suggest it, which I wouldn’t, would ever have gone for that because that would be sucking away our focus from the only thing that matters, which is getting people to the polls,” Sabor says. “Doors. Voters. It’s all that matters. It. Is. All. That. Matters. That is my one job, to win elections and get Democrats elected up and down the ballot.”
But Dane has one more sophisticated turnout machine that is increasingly common in college towns: students themselves. More politically active here than most other college towns, students have been an important voting bloc for years. From Bascom Hill, the historic core of the UW-Madison campus, there is a direct line of sight to the state capitol at the opposite end of State Street. That proximity to power gives their work a sense of immediacy and relevance.
But it’s not just in Madison where students are mobilizing in greater numbers — it’s in most of the counties where there is a university or a UW campus. In the 2022 midterm elections,
49 percent of those aged 18-24 voted in Wisconsin — the highest figure among all 50 states and double the national average.
Wisconsin students of this generation came of age during a period that has felt like partisan wartime defined by mass shootings, climate change, two presidential impeachments, Covid and Jan. 6. Then, last year,
Roe vs. Wade was overturned. They understand that every vote counts because they have seen razor-thin margins decide many statewide elections. Trump carried the state in 2016 by less than a percentage point — just 23,000 votes. Four years later, when Biden flipped the state, the margin was even smaller. Recounts and audits followed, underscoring the importance of just a few strategically cast votes.
The spring court election saw the youth vote at its most muscular. One of those students was Maggie Keuler, a 21-year-old senior political science major from eastern Wisconsin. On Election Day, Keuler was out of her apartment by 6:30 a.m. to place 4-by-8-foot campaign signs across the campus before the polls opened at 7 a.m. She ditched her classes to spend the day at a voting information table on Library Mall, the open space that is ideal for wrangling students as they walk to and from classes.
“It was school later, election now,” says Keuler, whose work as president of the College Democrats and also as a youth organizing director for the state party amounted to something close to a full-time job, including three door-knocking shifts a day on weekends. “I came here to do this kind of work. Part of the reason I chose Wisconsin was so I could continue to be a part of these efforts and was not going to let school get in the way of that.”
Keuler’s commitment was extreme, but it wasn’t entirely unusual. Emily Treffert, a rising sophomore from Milwaukee County, also says she came to Madison for the politics. She got involved with midterm election organizing efforts during her first semester at college. Then, during her second semester, she joined Project 72, one of a handful of different liberal groups that organized on college campuses across the state.
The Power of Dane County 
We showed up more than Milwaukee County last election, yet they have a bigger populace, not to mention Marquette is in Milwaukee.
