As the 2020 election approaches, both parties are sinking money and time into college campuses, driven by the idea that students—often dismissed as low-turnout layabouts—could have a huge effect in a tight race in a swing state. The mega-campuses of the Brobdingnagian public universities and community colleges in states like like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania are sometimes called “battleground campuses” by organizers and activists on the ground. “In an election that could come down to a point or two either way in Arizona or Wisconsin, turning out voters at ASU, University of Wisconsin-Madison and other college campuses in these states could easily make the difference,” said Andrew Baumann, a pollster for Global Strategy Group, a consulting firm that spent 2018 trying to figure out what makes the would-be college voter tick for Tom Steyer’s NextGen.

“It’s pretty clear that 2020 is going to shatter records for turnout given what we saw in 2018, the Virginia and Kentucky elections a couple of weeks ago, and what we’re seeing in every poll that asks about enthusiasm to vote or motivation,” Baumann said. “And the group that has the most room to grow is young people.” While young voters still turned out at lower rates than older voters in 2018, their rate of increase in turnout was, he says, “by far” the highest.

In the Trump era, college students are voting in record numbers. In 2018, 7.5 million college students who were eligible to vote went to the polls. That was a 40 percent turnout, more than double the rate four years earlier, according to researchers at Tufts University. At ASU, of the students registered to vote in the most recent midterms, 59 percent pulled a lever, compared to 27 percent in 2014.

And there are more young people now than ever. In 2020, people between 18 and 23 will make up a tenth of the electorate, up from just 4 percent in 2016. Going beyond college-age Americans, voters between 18 and 29 now represent 21 percent of the population. That’s 46 million voters, compared to 39 million among seniors.

With multiple Starbucks, their own police departments, community engagement centers and polling booths, these massive universities are like small cities. In 2016, Trump took Arizona by 91,234 votes. ASU’s total 2018 enrollment was 111,249 (with 72,709 students on its campuses and 38,540 enrolled online). In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,748. The student population at the University of Wisconsin at Madison is nearly double that. Trump secured Pennsylvania with 44,292 votes. The student population at Pennsylvania State University at State College is more than twice that. And in Michigan, where Trump won by almost 11,000 votes, Michigan State University’s student body count is more than four times that number. College students really could help swing a state and therefore the presidential election, as well as make the difference for a U.S. Senate seat and other down-ballot races.

“You’ve got 50,000 kids living in a fairly compact area,” said Teddy Goff, a partner at Precision Strategies, a consulting firm in Washington that was founded by veterans of Barack Obama’s political operation. “If you’ve got people on foot going door to door or standing in a single location with a clip board and fliers there’s not a more effective way to get people registered and ready to vote.”

In advance of Trump’s reelection effort, his son Don Jr. has embarked on a near-constant tour of swing state universities, often with his girlfriend and former Fox News host, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Since announcing her 2020 run, the selfie-fueled Elizabeth Warren has addressed a 3,000-person audience in an auditorium at ASU about “money-driven corruption in Washington” and student loan debt. During a recent call inquiring about the preponderance of candidates addressing students the University of Michigan, I was told the press office was too busy to talk, as the university was planning a visit from Hillary Clinton, who came the next day, to share her wisdom on how to beat (or perhaps just get more votes than) Trump.

Yet polls also show that these young voters are less likely to identify with political parties, which they view as feckless entities corrupted by big business and bureaucrats, than they are to ally with specific issues like health care or LGBTQ rights. This aversion to parties can make them less predictable than boomers who have voter files that are decades-long.

In addition to untold student debt, many young college students also bear resentment that no one kept the semi-automatics out of their high schools. They aren’t really mad, according to surveys, polls and chats with people who spend a lot of time with them, as much as they are ready to take charge.

Even if they resist being identified as party members, most college students vote for the Democrats, so it would seem that Trump’s eventual opponent would have an obvious advantage on the nation’s campuses. Voters of ages 18 to 29 supported Democrats by a 44-point margin in 2018, Baumann says. That was up from a 25-point margin in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But with a well-funded and heavily coordinated band of conservative groups long used to outspending Democrats, it’s not entirely clear who is the David and who is the Goliath. The Leadership Institute, a school for young conservatives founded by Morton Blackwell, has trained more than 200,000 Republican-leaning activists since its inception in 1979. Among its graduates are Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Mitch McConnell. Last fiscal year, the institute had nearly $20 million in net assets and worked with close to 2,000 groups, holding nearly 6,000 campus activities. A review of dozens of tax documents indicate that this past fiscal year alone, conservative foundations spent more than $100 million on the long-term venture of drawing college students to their side, with groups like Young America’s Foundation, which has $70 million in net assets, alone spending more than $19 million on educational endeavors.

NextGen America, the progressive, get-out-the-vote group founded by California billionaire turned 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer, is the most prominent advocacy outfit aimed at the young left. It spent $38 million in 2018 and is expected to spend at least that much in 2020 on voter participation efforts, mostly on large schools in swing states. That’s made NextGen a campus darling and has helped it to infuse its well-tested strategies into other less impressively funded progressive groups.

But together conservative groups are expected to far exceed that. Students for Trump, the political arm of Charlie Kirk’s conservative Turning Point U.S.A., has announced that it will be spending an estimated $15 million, and Young Americans for Liberty is planning on spending a projected $13 million on campuses recruiting, training and canvassing for 150 libertarian candidates that the organization plans to endorse in state legislative races around the country.

Sitting at one of ASU’s five Starbucks, wearing a blue T-shirt that read Be A Voter, Azza Abuseif, who is the Arizona coordinator for NextGen, told me her team at ASU—111 volunteers, two paid organizers and a regional coordinator who oversees operations—was focused on one thing: “Register, register, register.” In 2018, the group registered more than 20,000 young Arizonans and aims to register at least as many for 2020. Other groups in the state will focus on stoking the state’s Latino population, or white suburban women, or Native Americans and African Americans. As Abuseif said, “We are going to bring the youth vote.”

“We believe we can change this election by targeting students,” she told me.

Austin Smith, the administrative director for the PAC overseeing Students for Trump, told me he wasn’t sure Abuseif’s plan would do the trick. It was lunchtime and he was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, despite the scorching heat. We were standing on the campus’ main quad a week after Voter Registration Day, and activists of all political persuasions were enticing students to their tables. Turning Point’s table—bursting with volunteers wearing T-shirts that said “Hate Us ‘Cause They Aint’ Us,” a nod to the group’s belief in American exceptionalism—seemed to be garnering the most attention.

Smith seemed to know that he wasn’t going to persuade a majority of his peers to vote to reelect Trump—but that isn’t the plan. If Students for Trump can distract its progressive rivals and shave off a few votes for the Democrats here and there, they’ll count it as a win, maybe even a decisive one. “We’re going to get a larger amount of votes than most political consultants and pundits think,” Smith told me. “We don’t need as many votes as the left does.”

Still, in 2016 in Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton won voters under 30 by just 4 points. Across the fabled and breached Blue Wall that year, college-aged field organizers grumbled bitterly that they’d been ignored by Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn. In Michigan, they alleged, frequent requests for campaign literature were denied by Brooklyn. In Pennsylvania, young canvassers said Brooklyn brushed aside their on-the-ground observations that Trump was more appealing than the campaign’s beloved data was indicating. And in Wisconsin, when Clinton failed to show up to a single Wisconsin college between the Democratic National Convention and Election Day, Wisconsinites, young and old, returned the favor. Trump won the state by less than 23,000 votes. Green Party candidate Jill Stein got 31,000 votes.

In the months after the 2018 midterms, Rachel Haltom-Irwin, Barack Obama’s 2012 get-out-the-vote director, presented an idea to the Democratic National Committee for a national college student training program that would center on the swing state ground game and make efficient use of young activists. Called Organizing Corps, the multimillion-dollar program targets mostly students of color. This past summer, the program trained 300 students in an Atlanta classroom, and then sent them back to their swing states with instructors who continued to coach them on the ground for another seven weeks. The process is designed to resemble a “medical residency,” Haltom-Irwin said. There are currently 25 members in Arizona. More young Arizonians will be trained in Tempe in January.

On the Republican side, a similar interest in college students has surfaced but for the opposite reason. Although polls showed that support for Trump among younger voters was dismal, he surpassed expectations, earning 37 percent of the millennial vote, exactly what Mitt Romney had gotten in 2012. Trump did particularly well with young white males. Turning Point’s Kirk, who had spent months on the trail advocating for the president, believed the election was a sign. “The president won and a lot of young people who love our country realized he was looking out for us,” Kirk told me. “He was restoring the idea of America, our values and our pride.”

Weeks after the election, Trump’s staff began meeting with the leaders of student youth groups to explore how issues around campus speech could be pushed to generate more support for a president who was already developing an unlikely cult following among certain young, mostly white evangelicals and hardliners who related to his resistance to “PC” culture. They saw him as a rebellious rabble-rouser bucking a liberal establishment that had been snubbing them since they’d arrived on their campuses. Buoyed by the momentum, groups like Prager University, a conservative website that produces videos designed for young undecideds, looked to expand their reach. And the Leadership Institute reformulated a two-day training program so they could take it on the road to the growing number of conservative student conferences.

But it was Turning Point, the group that has touted as its mission for seven years “to identify, educate, train and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets and limited government” that saw the most drastic uptick. The group says it will have increased the number of its chapters to more than 600 by this fall. Members didn’t see Trump’s win as a victorious ending, but the beginning of a new movement to return conservative ideas to their campuses.

Nowhere has this uptick been more pronounced than in Arizona. On one side is a pack of heavily energized progressive organizations that sprouted to life in 2010 on high school and college campuses as a response to the state’s crackdown on undocumented residents, led by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. During the 2018 midterms, these young activists helped to elect a new secretary of state and a new schools superintendent, the first Democrats to hold those offices in decades. They began to believe that if they could strengthen their campus ground game even more, especially at schools like ASU, they might be able to play a significant role in defeating Trump in Arizona in 2020.

On the other side is a group of young Arizona conservatives driven by Tyler Bowyer, an ASU grad who landed a seat on Arizona’s Board of Regents in 2011. In 2016, Trump’s victory felt to Bowyer like a personal one. While leading the Republican Party of Maricopa County, the largest in the state, he had organized one of the nation’s first Trump for president rallies. Shortly after the election, when Kirk went looking for a place to build out Turning Point’s headquarters, Bowyer had already been hired to develop a leadership program for the nonprofit and was building Turning Point’s West Coast presence. Kirk chose Arizona, at Bowyer’s prodding, and hired him to run the organization’s daily operations from his home state.

Turning Point's headquarters are in a warehouse in an office park purposefully situated a mere 10 minutes from the Phoenix Airport, so students from other campuses can easily fly in and out for three- and four-day training sessions. It buzzes with the activity of dozens of young employees, many of whom recently graduated from ASU. When I arrived on an early October morning, passing through a carpeted entryway, I was ushered into a conference room that overlooks one of Phoenix’s jagged mountain ranges, decorated with photos of a beaming Kirk—with Trump, with Kellyanne Conway, with Jordan Peterson. There I met Bowyer, an effervescent 34-year-old wearing jeans, a baseball cap and a fleece jacket with Turning Point’s logo on the lapel. He was on the phone with the White House, he said, discussing plans for a black leadership summit booked for that weekend where black college students were scheduled to meet the president, which they did.

Many conservative donors and Turning Point members believe, seemingly rightly, that campuses and the professors that teach on them aren’t just pushers of liberal thought, but promoters of the Democratic Party platform. The place is studded with framed posters and placards taped to cubicles that bash the political leanings of the average campus progressive: “Taxation is Theft,” and “If socialism is so great why don’t people flee from Florida to Cuba?” There are desk chairs draped in American flag quilts and little elephant statues, a nod to the Grand Old Party mascot, scattered about.

When I was there several young, casually dressed staffers were inputting data on the 600-plus chapters regional directors were helping to develop, collecting the names and phone numbers of hundreds of young conservatives. In front of oversized computer screens, graphic designers mulled color schemes and fonts—using specs found in a 126-page brand guide for Turning Point—for material that is mailed to campuses across the country. This headquarters is also where Turning Point oversees its Professor Watch list, a controversial online archive of college and university professors who are said to have expressed rage at the president or dismay at right-wing policies.

Turning Point has a professional TV studio that feeds directly to Fox News and a huge production area where editors design memes and videos that take down campus “snowflakes” and leftist politicians. In the back, Alex Clark, the ripped-jean wearing host of Poplitics, a five-minute multi-platform show that Turning Point launched late last month, was finishing up the editing of her first episode.

I stepped into the office of the events administrator, Gage Huber, who was planning the group’s upcoming annual summit, held every December at the West Palm Beach Convention Center. A list of needed purchases—lighting, grass carpeting, new furniture—was hastily scrawled on a white board next to the words: Sense of Urgency. This year’s summit, Huber told me, was going for the look and feel of Coachella, the music festival. There are 5,000 expected attendees, and Turning Point says it has reserved rooms in seven hotels to house them.

Students for Trump, the group’s newly formed political arm, Bowyer made a point of telling me, would be opening in a few days in a warehouse across the parking lot. It would be organized in much the same way as its sister organization, with paid staff members in all 50 states, divided up by regions and territories, using the same methodology to determine what types of communications best persuade college students. Most of its efforts, he told me, would be clustered on large campuses in the 2020 battleground states.

He propped up a large, color-coded posterboard map of the country carved up into regions and later showed me a flow chart of the group’s employees. The same structure would be used for Students for Trump.

“We are going to run this thing like a midsize sales company,” Bowyer said.

Studies of donor patterns suggest that Republican groups are better than their Democratic counterparts at soliciting funds early for upcoming elections. That fundraising edge is probably why Turning Point feels like it is hurdling headfirst into the social media obsessed future, while its local progressive rival, One Arizona, resembles a lightly staffed suburban accounting firm. An umbrella organization that helps coordinate the state’s progressive groups, One Arizona does its work 12 miles away, on the top floor of a 1970s-era brick and stucco office building, in a suite of carpeted offices above Arizona’s school employees union.

But One Arizona’s drab offices mask a sophisticated operation that, like Students for Trump, carefully tracks what get-out-the-vote tactics—doors, phones, digital ads, mail, radio—work best. On both sides, nothing in this regard is left to chance. Bowyer’s team at Turning Point have spent hours exploring what colors elicit the warmest response, in-person and online (“Green,” he told me), or what kind of tone should be used for a video designed to change a 20-something’s opinion. (“Keep it as simple as possible, as acceptable as possible, as tongue-in-cheek as possible. That’s what’s going to be shared,” he said.) The research is mixed on whether a young person with undeveloped views about which side to vote for wants to hear his peers bash Elizabeth Warren or pump up Trump. Not mixed is how much fear of “socialism” resonates with young, middle-of-the-road voters. And a greasy hipster is a good way to elicit annoyance about sloppy complainers who don’t want to work very hard. “There aren’t that many of them,” Bowyer said. “But everyone knows one.”

“It doesn’t necessarily work with this generation to make voting a political thing,” said Baumann, the Global Strategy Group pollster. “Many young people believe that politics is broken and not working. You don’t want to remind them of something they don’t like. You want to make voting a positive, empowering, community experience.”

Yet at the same time, campus politics and national politics seem to have merged. On a Sunday in early November, Turning Point fans in Arizona and across the country celebrated “MAGA Pride Day,” a predictable stab at college Pride celebrations, as part of the official launch of Students for Trump. Students tossed their red MAGA hats in the air and posted their photos online. On the winter schedule are a roster of campus stopovers for Kirk and Don Jr., who made a series of college visits in the past few weeks to talk about Biden and impeachment and to rile up Democrats over the $50,000 the University of Florida at Gainesville spent to have him and Guilfoyle show up.

The results of that tour, however, have been checkered. Don Jr. was booed off the stage not long ago at the University of California at Los Angeles during an event to promote his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. In that case, the alt-right did the booing. But Don Jr. is unsurprisingly getting it from all sides. This week, Michael C. Murphy, the student body president who invited him to speak at the University of Florida, was accused of “malfeasance” and “abuse of power,” the Tampa Bay Times and the university’s independent student newspaper the Alligator reported, for deploying student fees to pay for the appearance.

Like the rest of American life, basically everything has become a part of, or a response to, the Trump show. At the University of Florida, a student senator said the student president “colluded,” not with Russia or Ukraine in this case, but “with a member of the Donald Trump campaign.” The remedy, naturally, is a resolution of impeachment.