Michigan's college towns saw strong turnout for the Nov. 3 midterm, with high participation among Michigan State University students and Ann Arbor setting a city record for Election Day voter registrations. The surge came in an election where Democrats swept nearly every major statewide race on the ballot, from an open U.S. Senate seat to the governor's office.
According to The Detroit News, high turnout among young voters, driven largely by college students, gave Democratic candidates a boost as the party rode a historic blue wave across Michigan. Statewide, Democrats won the open Senate seat, retook the state House, held the state Senate, and captured the races for governor, secretary of state and attorney general, according to mlive.com. An unofficial count from the Secretary of State's Office showed 4,840,262 Michiganders cast ballots, a figure still subject to change until certification.
MSU Students Turn Out for Midterm
At Michigan State University, students turned out in large numbers for the Nov. 3 election, the Lansing State Journal reports.
The election drew strong student participation at MSU.
Ann Arbor Sets Records at the Polls
Ann Arbor logged 64,713 ballots cast in the general election, representing turnout of 71.59% of active registered voters and 58.95% of all registered voters, according to the Ann Arbor City Clerk. The city also recorded 3,330 new voter registrations on Election Day itself, a city record, though officials cautioned those statistics remain preliminary and subject to change during the official canvass.
At the University of Michigan's two campus voting hubs, total registration rose 7% and tabulated voting jumped nearly 19% compared with 2024, per The University Record. Those two hubs alone accounted for 44% of all early votes cast in Ann Arbor, up from 39% in 2024, the same University of Michigan publication reports. The University Record reported that 2,641 people registered and cast ballots at the hubs on Election Day, more than double the previous figure.
How This Measures Against Past Elections
Michigan's overall 2026 turnout was about 7.5% higher than the previous midterm record of 4,500,400 votes set in 2022, mlive.com reports. The state saw 57.2% of its 8.46 million registered voters cast ballots, the second-highest midterm turnout rate dating back to 1978, trailing only the 58.1% record set in 2018. Leelanau County posted the state's highest turnout at 73.5% of its registered voters, while Cass County had the lowest at 47.1%, according to the same mlive.com analysis, which also found that many of the state's highest-turnout counties voted Democratic, with most metro Detroit counties ranking high except for right-leaning Macomb County.
The Election Day numbers at the University of Michigan hubs were more than double the 1,292 people who registered and voted there during the 2024 presidential election, the Detroit Free Press reports.
What National Youth Data Does and Doesn't Show
National research from CIRCLE at Tufts University estimated that 27% of young people voted in the 2026 midterms, the second-highest youth midterm turnout in three decades, with aggregate youth turnout reaching 30% in battleground states, a list that included Michigan. Nationally, 66% of voters ages 18 to 29 backed a Democratic U.S. House candidate in 2026, compared with 31% who backed a Republican, CIRCLE found, versus 56% support among voters ages 30 to 44.
In the 2022 midterm, 37.6% of eligible Michigan voters ages 18 to 29 voted, the highest rate among states. Michigan's own 2022 records, compiled by Bridge Michigan, showed 37.2% of registered voters 30 and younger cast a ballot that year, down from 42.2% in 2018, even as voters 18 to 30 made up a slightly larger share of the overall electorate, 13.6%, compared with 13.1% in 2018.
