VARSITY BLUES — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in Utah today, a reminder that the 2024 Republican presidential primary is unfolding across more states than just Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s one of a big collection of states set to vote on Super Tuesday, March 5, a date that is likely to prove pivotal to the outcome of the nomination fight.

With DeSantis out west, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott set to embark on a fundraising tour of six different non-early voting states over the next month, it’s a good time to take stock of the emerging presidential map — and the trends that are shaping it.

One of them is the emergence of college counties as an electoral force, the subject of a POLITICO magazine deep dive today.

In state after state, fast-growing, traditionally liberal college counties are flexing their muscles, generating higher turnout and ever greater Democratic margins. They’ve already played a pivotal role in turning several red states blue — and they could play an equally decisive role in key swing states next year.

One of those states is Michigan. Twenty years ago, the University of Michigan’s Washtenaw County gave Democrat Al Gore what seemed to be a massive victory — a 60-36 percent win over Republican George W. Bush, marked by a margin of victory of roughly 34,000 votes. Yet that was peanuts compared to what happened in 2020. Biden won Washtenaw by close to 50 percentage points, with a winning margin of about 101,000 votes.

Name the flagship university — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others — and the story tends to be the same. If the surrounding county was a reliable source of Democratic votes in the past, it’s a landslide county now. There are exceptions to the rule, particularly in the states with the most conservative voting habits. But even in reliably red places like South Carolina, Montana and Texas, you’ll find at least one college-oriented county producing ever larger Democratic margins.

The American Communities Project, which has developed a typology of different kinds of counties, designates 171 independent cities and counties as “College Towns.” Of those 171 places, 38 have flipped from red to blue since the 2000 presidential election. Just seven flipped the other way, from blue to red, and typically by smaller margins.

Back in 2000, they voted 48 percent to 47 percent in favor of Al Gore. In the last presidential election, the 25 million who live in those places voted for Joe Biden, 54 percent to 44 percent.

Keep in mind many populous urban counties that are home to large universities don’t even make the ACP’s “College Towns” list because their economic and demographic profiles differentiate them from more traditional college counties. Among the missing are places like the University of Texas’ Travis County, where the Democratic margin of victory grew by 290,000 votes since 2000, and the University of New Mexico’s Bernalillo County, where the margin grew by 73,000 votes. The University of Minnesota’s Hennepin County has become bluer by 245,000 votes.

North Carolina offers a revealing snapshot of a state whose college towns have altered its electoral landscape. Five of the state’s nine counties that contain so-called college towns have gone blue since voting for George W. Bush in 2000. Back then, the nine counties together netted roughly 12,000 votes for Bush, who carried the state by nearly 13 percent. Twenty years later, those numbers had broken dramatically in the opposite direction — Biden netted 222,000 votes from those counties. He still lost the state, but the margin was barely more than 1 percent.

There’s no single factor driving the college town trend. In some places, it’s an influx of left-leaning, highly educated newcomers, drawn to growing, cutting-edge industries advanced by university research or the vibrant quality of life. In others, it’s rising levels of student engagement on growing campuses. Often, it’s a combination of both.

What’s clear is that these places are altering the political calculus across the national map.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the GOP, which is responding in ways that reach beyond traditional tensions between conservative lawmakers and liberal universities — such as targeting students’ voting rights, creating additional barriers to voter access or redrawing maps to dilute or limit the power of college communities. But there are limits to what those efforts can accomplish. They aren’t geared toward growing the GOP vote, merely toward suppressing Democratic totals.

Two states to keep an eye on next year: Arizona and Georgia. Both were decided by less than 12,000 votes in 2020 — and both have seen dramatic growth since 2000 in the Democratic winning margins in their college counties.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s author at [email protected] or on Twitter at @PoliticoCharlie.

— Judge sets Trump classified-documents trial for next May: Donald Trump will stand trial on May 20, 2024 — after most presidential primaries have elapsed — on charges that he hoarded military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate, a federal judge ordered Friday.

U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon appeared to split the difference between prosecutors’ request for a December 2023 trial date and Trump’s request to postpone the trial until after the November 2024 election.

The new ruling from Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, largely sidesteps the issue of how the preparations for the trial in the federal case she is overseeing will interface with the demands of a presidential election campaign. Cannon noted that Trump’s lawyers argued that the case would face “insurmountable prejudice in jury selection stemming from publicity about the 2024 Presidential Election,” but she found it “unnecessary” to address that issue “at this juncture.”

— House GOP committee chairs launch probe into Ford-China battery deal: Two House GOP committee chairs are launching a probe into Ford Motor Company’s agreement with a Chinese battery company — prompting renewed scrutiny into U.S. corporate links to China amid a boom in domestic clean energy manufacturing.

Ford announced an agreement with Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited, or CATL, in February for its new $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan. Under the structure of the agreement, Ford said it would manufacture the battery cells using knowledge and services provided by CATL.

— Alabama’s redistricting brawl rehashes bitter fight over voting rights: A court ordered Alabama’s legislature to redraw its congressional map to give Black voters more power.

The Legislature’s response? Not unless we have to. The GOP-dominated Legislature passed maps on Friday that disregarded a lower federal court’s directive — one reinforced in June by the Supreme Court — that it should include two districts with a Black “voting-age majority or something quite close to it” when it redraws its lines. The legislature, over the unified objections of Democrats, instead came up with districts that fall short of that, even as Republicans argue they are in adherence.

HALEY VS. HARRIS — One way GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley is trying to get some attention? Zeroing in on her favorite punching bag: Vice President Kamala Harris, POLITICO writes.

Harris is an easy target: an LA Times poll out this week positions her as the least popular VP in recent history. Haley has made the repeated claim that if Biden is reelected, Harris will take over. “A vote for President Biden is actually a vote for President Harris,” she tweeted in June.

She’s also repeatedly bashed Harris’ competency (“Kamala Harris is one of the most incompetent elected officials in the country”) and painted her as “unbelievably extremist.” The former South Carolina governor doubled down last Friday, in an interview with Tucker Carlson at the 2023 Family Leadership Summit: “We can’t afford a President Kamala Harris. I will say that over and over again.”

SMALL-DONOR DROUGHT — There’s been a dramatic downturn in small-dollar donations across the board, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal campaign finance data.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reported raising $15.2 million from donors giving less than $200 through the end of June, compared to $23.5 million over the same period two years ago and $19.5 million in 2019. The National Republican Congressional Committee’s fundraising from small-dollar donors similarly dropped to $7.1 million through the end of June compared to $20.6 million two years ago and $8.7 million in 2019.

On the presidential level, Joe Biden’s campaign reported $10 million raised in the second quarter from donors giving less than $200, less than half of what the previous two incumbent presidents had raised at this point in the cycle. For Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the GOP presidential field’s top fundraiser in the second quarter, just $3 million out of $20 million raised came from small-dollar donors. Donald Trump hasn’t yet released his small-dollar information.

SMALL TOWN — GOP presidential candidates are wading into a new cultural battle by playing Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” at their campaign events, NBC News reports.

In New Hampshire on Thursday, Vivek Ramaswamy started and ended his town hall by playing the song by country star Aldean, whose music video prominently features a courthouse that was the site of a lynching in 1927 was pulled from the air this week by CMT after backlash.

GOP contender Nikki Haley played the song ahead of her entrance during a campaign stop Thursday night in Greenville, South Carolina. “I hope you loved my playlist before I came on,” Haley said.

OUT FROM THE COLD — President Joe Biden is staking his reelection bid on the political and financial muscle of the Democratic National Committee, according to the Associated Press.

As it prepares for a bruising 2024 contest, his campaign plans to raise and spend around $2 billion. But it will do so in coordination with the national and state Democratic parties, in an effort to establish a coordinated campaign around the country. The idea is to bolster field, volunteer and data organizations, and ensure they work jointly to promote Biden and down-ballot Democratic candidates.

The strategy is different from the way the last Democratic president treated the DNC. Barack Obama largely shunned the party’s traditional fundraising apparatus and instead raised money with his own groups, relying on personal star power. That helped leave the DNC depleted and in debt.

BAD BREAKUP — Sooner rather than later, Belgium may cease to exist.

The small Western European state that hosts the headquarters of the EU and NATO has long had a dysfunctional national political life, writes POLITICO. It holds the world record for the longest time taken to form a government during coalition talks — over 500 days. Now the strains between Dutch-speaking Flanders, in the north, and French-speaking Wallonia in the south of the country threaten a far bigger crisis.

Elections are due to be held in June 2024. According to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, the far-right Vlaams Belang party — which wants to turn Flanders into a fully independent, breakaway state — is now the biggest political force in the country.

GIVING THANKS — Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired Vadym Prystaiko as Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, after the envoy criticized the Ukrainian president in public, reports POLITICO.

Zelenskyy’s decree, announcing the dismissal of the ambassador, does not give a reason for his decision. But it comes after Prystaiko criticized Zelenskyy’s punchy response to U.K. Defense Minister Ben Wallace, who suggested that Ukraine should show more gratitude to its allies.

Speaking to reporters at the NATO summit in Vilnius earlier this month, Wallace said that the U.S. is heading for a presidential election next year, and lawmakers from countries making big military donations to Kyiv could face a political problem if they are met with Ukrainian anger. There is concern across much of Europe that NATO-skeptic Donald Trump could return as U.S. president. Zelenskyy responded with an ironic remark during the press briefing in Vilnius, saying he does not understand how much more he should express his thanks, in response to Wallace’s comment. “He can write to me about how he wants to be thanked, so we can fully express our gratitude. We can make a point to wake up (every) morning and thank him,” Zelenskyy said.

THE ‘GOLDEN AGE OF PALEONTOLOGY’ — Paleontologists are uncovering new dinosaurs at an astonishing rate. On average, a new species of “terrible lizard” is named about every two weeks from fossil sites all over the world. And as experts announce each astonishing species, the nature of the dinosaur family tree shifts. Fossil hunters are not just uncovering new dinosaur species—they’re revealing entirely new dinosaur groups that were unknown even ten years ago.

“One of my go-to lines whenever I’m giving a public talk or writing a pop science article or book,” says University of Edinburgh paleontologist Stephen Brusatte, “is that we’re in the golden age of paleontology.”

While the 19th-century “Bone Wars” are widely known as when many dinosaurs were discovered and named, the early 21st century is seeing the greatest dinosaur bone rush of all time. Paleontologists are rapidly documenting various non-avian dinosaurs that roamed our planet between 66 million and 235 million years ago—a span of time more than two and a half times as long as the post-Cretaceous history of our planet. And experts hypothesize that more dinosaurs remain unknown than have been uncovered, writes Riley Black for Smithsonian magazine.