Considering their populations and such. It always seems like around college towns, you have perhaps a few layers of left leaning rural precincts. The political sphere of influence often extends beyond the County the college town itself is in, even though I doubt enough staff would commute to and from precincts in the next County over enough to make it D-leaning. Idk.
Some examples are:
Ann-Arbour, MI
Durham/Chapel Hill, NC
Ithaca, NY
Charlottesville, VA
Asheville, NC
Princeton, NJ
Iowa City, IA
However, you also have some colleges/college towns that really don't seem to have very extensive political influence.
Stony Brook, NY
Tuscaloosa, AL
College Station, TX
University of California, Orange County, CA
And some where the impact is hard to tell because they're already in hyper-liberal part of a large city. Would that part of the city still be hyper-liberal without the college? Hard to say:
Cambridge/MIT, MA
NYU, NY
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
When you look at things like precinct results from the 1980s, this seems strongly correlated with having been liberal enclaves for a very long time. Schools like Texas A&M may still have a conservative reputation, but they once voted Republican outright, while places like Charlottesville or Ithaca or Iowa City were already liberal enclaves even before the drift of educated voters leftwards started happening really earnestly (before the 1992 cycle, in other words). I think in places where this reputation is old it has meaningfully warped 'usual' migration patterns.
