Top Republican lawyer tells donors conservatives should work to limit voting on college campuses

A top Republican lawyer told donors at a Republican National Committee (RNC) retreat last weekend that conservatives should work to limit voting on college campuses.

Cleta Mitchell, a GOP lawyer who assisted former President Trump in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, called on Saturday for Republicans to “combat” efforts to turnout college voters — a group that significantly tilts Democratic.

“We need to be looking at, what are these college campus locations and polling?” Mitchell said in audio of the presentation obtained by journalist Lauren Windsor. “What is this young-people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorms, so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”

She specifically pointed to Wisconsin, where liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz won a state Supreme Court race earlier this month. With Protasiewicz on the bench, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will have a liberal majority for the first time in 15 years.

“Wisconsin is a big problem … because of the polling locations on college campuses,” Mitchell added. “There are 501(c)(3)s. Their goal for the Supreme Court race was to turn out 240,000 college students in that Supreme Court race. And we don’t have anything like that, and we need to figure out how to do that and combat that.”

In addition to Wisconsin, Mitchell also focused on campus voting in several other battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Virginia, as well as the preregistration of students under 18 years of age, according to The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the presentation.

Mitchell previously garnered national attention for her participation in a January 2021 call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president asked the top Georgia election official to “find” 11,000 more votes for him in the state.