This year’s incoming freshman class has political opinions which match the rest of the Washington University student body, according to a recent poll conducted by Student Life.
Nearly 80 percent of freshmen plan to vote for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, in November’s general election while Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, would win 15 percent of the freshman vote.
These figures mirror the results of a poll taken in March that surveyed the entire campus, in which Obama, who was not yet the presumptive nominee, won 78 percent of student support. Nineteen percent of respondents to that poll supported Senator McCain.
In the wake of the recent housing crisis and the fall of the dollar’s relative value, freshmen, like a plurality of University students, identified the economy and globalization as the most pressing issues in the upcoming presidential election; more than one-third of freshman named that pair as the most pressing facing the nation. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the next most selected issue, received less than half as much attention, with 16 percent of respondents calling the wars the campaign’s top issue.
Despite Senator McCain’s vocal support for the U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East, only six percent of his supporters said that the wars were the election’s top issue, although almost 85 percent of them believed that McCain would handle the wars better than Obama.
Nearly 82 percent of Obama supporters responded that he would handle the wars better.
McCain supporters also responded that he would deal with traditional Republican priorities such as taxes, the economy and managing the federal government better than Obama, though they also felt that Obama would handle social inequality and poverty better than McCain would.
There were no issues that Obama supporters felt McCain would handle better than the Democratic nominee.
Two-thirds of freshmen either identified with the Democratic Party or responded that they lean toward the Democratic Party, while 14 percent of respondents either identify as or lean toward the Republican Party. Almost a quarter of respondents neither aligned with nor leaned toward either party. Sixty percent of unaligned voters supported Obama.
Among Republican respondents, 81 percent considered themselves moderately Republican; 56 percent of Democrats consider themselves moderately Democratic.
This is the first Student Life poll this year and the first following Obama’s clinching of the Democratic nomination at the beginning of June. While the long Democratic nomination contest between Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York seemed to have little effect on freshman candidate preferences-it affected 12 percent of respondents’ choices-56 percent of respondents felt that the six-month string of Democratic primary races hurt the party.
The general preference for Obama among freshmen corresponds with their view of the current U.S. government. Over 60 percent of respondents believe the country is going the wrong direction, and nearly 85 percent disapprove of the job that President George W. Bush is doing. A third of respondents also disapproved of the Democrat-controlled US Congress, with nine percent approving of Congress’s job so far.
Two-thirds of McCain’s supporters were women, while an equal number of men and women supported Obama.
The most recent Student Life poll data was collected through an e-mail sent to the undergraduate student population between June 23 and June 29. There were 342 responses to the poll, allowing for a theoretical margin of error of 4.61 percent.