Just under five thousand registered voters aged 18 to 24 live in student housing across Los Angeles County. Three hundred and forty of them are registered Republicans.
That is 6.8 percent. Across the county as a whole, 12.7 percent of registered voters in the same age group are Republicans. A young voter living in a dormitory is, in other words, about half as likely to be a registered Republican as a young voter living anywhere else in Los Angeles County.
But the county average conceals something far more interesting than the average itself. The Republican share of campus housing is not low everywhere. It ranges from under two percent at some campuses to nearly seventy percent at another. Where young Republicans live on campus, they are not scattered. They are concentrated.
The spread between campuses is enormous
Below is the Republican share of registered voters aged 18 to 24 living in each campus’s housing. The bars are scaled to the highest campus.
Countywide, 12.7 percent of registered voters aged 18 to 24 are Republicans — a higher share than fourteen of these eighteen campuses.
Two campuses hold more than a third of them
The Master’s University in Santa Clarita and Biola University in La Mirada have 195 registered voters aged 18 to 24 living in their housing between them. One hundred and eighteen of those are Republicans.
UCLA, USC and every Cal State campus in the county have 3,630 registered voters aged 18 to 24 in their housing. Between them they produce 151 Republicans.
Two small private universities, with one nineteenth of the registered students, deliver more than three quarters as many Republicans as the entire public university system in Los Angeles County.
The Master’s University and Biola
195 registered voters aged 18–24 · 118 Republican
UCLA, USC and the Cal States
3,630 registered voters aged 18–24 · 151 Republican
Republican Democrat No party preference and other
The third bar is worth as much attention as the first. Whether the campus leans heavily Republican or heavily Democratic, roughly three in ten students in campus housing register with no party at all. That figure barely moves between the two groups: 31.3 percent at The Master’s and Biola, 31.2 percent across the public universities. It is the one thing every campus in Los Angeles County has in common.
Every campus, in full
Counts are of active registered voters at addresses identified as that campus’s student housing. Residents of all ages are shown alongside, because graduate and family housing sits at many of the same addresses.
| Campus | Addresses | Aged 18–24 | Rep 18–24 | Rep share | All ages | Rep all ages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UCLA — university housing | 16 | 1,658 | 68 | 4.1% | 1,888 | 79 |
| Biola University | 1 | 109 | 62 | 56.9% | 164 | 78 |
| The Master’s University | 2 | 86 | 56 | 65.1% | 164 | 105 |
| Pepperdine University | 2 | 92 | 25 | 27.2% | 127 | 33 |
| Loyola Marymount | 4 | 456 | 25 | 5.5% | 547 | 30 |
| USC — university housing | 16 | 580 | 25 | 4.3% | 665 | 34 |
| Cal State Northridge | 4 | 366 | 15 | 4.1% | 507 | 27 |
| UCLA — Westwood apartments | 17 | 442 | 14 | 3.2% | 647 | 31 |
| USC — Figueroa corridor | 5 | 185 | 13 | 7.0% | 237 | 15 |
| Azusa Pacific | 2 | 42 | 12 | 28.6% | 54 | 14 |
| Cal State Long Beach | 3 | 205 | 12 | 5.9% | 239 | 17 |
| Cal State Dominguez Hills | 1 | 106 | 3 | 2.8% | 130 | 4 |
| Caltech | 1 | 53 | 3 | 5.7% | 72 | 4 |
| Claremont Colleges | 6 | 247 | 2 | 0.8% | 298 | 5 |
| University of La Verne | 2 | 32 | 2 | 6.3% | 41 | 2 |
| CalArts | 1 | 61 | 1 | 1.6% | 93 | 1 |
| Occidental College | 1 | 165 | 1 | 0.6% | 201 | 2 |
| Cal Poly Pomona | 2 | 88 | 1 | 1.1% | 96 | 1 |
| Total | 86 | 4,973 | 340 | 6.8% | 6,170 | 482 |
How the addresses were found
Of 373,807 addresses in the county with at least one registered voter aged 18 to 24, some 704 hold fifteen or more. Of those, 102 are also majority-young. Eighty-six of the 102 matched a campus.
The remaining sixteen are young-skewing buildings with no identifiable university connection. They were excluded rather than guessed at. Where a campus operates both university-owned housing and adjacent private student apartments — UCLA in Westwood, USC along Figueroa — the two are reported separately, because they are different populations and they register differently.
The method matters because the obvious alternative fails quietly. An earlier pass at this question worked from a hand-assembled list of campus addresses and missed Cal State Northridge entirely, because the campus mailing address had been recorded under the wrong postal code. It also missed Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Dominguez Hills, the Claremont Colleges, CalArts, the University of La Verne and The Master’s University — and therefore missed the single most Republican campus in the county. Letting the data find the addresses raised the count by more than half.
What this does and does not show
Why we published it
Political parties are usually told that the youth vote is a lost cause in Los Angeles County, and the countywide figure does little to argue otherwise. But 460 people is not nothing, and they are not spread thinly across four thousand square miles. They live at 99 addresses.
A party that knows that can do something about it. One that does not know it can only guess.
We publish the method as well as the numbers so that anyone can check the work, disagree with the definitions, or run it again for a different county. The figures come from the Los Angeles County Multipurpose Voter File as loaded on May 28, 2026 — active registrations present in that file, with ages calculated as of August 20, 2026.
An invitation
Graduating soon? Come to Burbank.
If you are finishing college in Los Angeles County and you are wondering where a young Republican can actually put down roots — the answer is eleven miles north of campus.
More than one in five Burbank voters is a registered Republican, and close to three thousand of them are under thirty-five. This is not a lonely place to hold your politics. You will find people your own age who already do.
We are not only a party here. We walk precincts, we show up at council and school board meetings, we run candidates, and we do the unglamorous work between elections that decides how a city is actually run. There is a place in that for anyone willing to do it — and we would rather hand it to someone at the start of their career than wait twenty years.
Come and meet us first if you like. Bring your questions.