Survey Reveals Student Voting Trends

By Broadside Staff Reporter Ethan Vaughan

On Feb. 5, the George Mason University Communication Department conducted the second of three student surveys in anticipation of the upcoming 2008 presidential election.

The department was assisted in its academic endeavor by an advisory body called the Insight Committee, which consists of prominent members within the social sciences and the national community at large. Among the members are eminent figures such as Clay McConnell, Vice Pres. of Corporate Communications for Airbus Americas; Tara Connell, Vice Pres. of Corporate Communications for Gannett, which owns, among others, USA Today; and Jeff Hedges, Vice Pres. of Sales for Columbia Broadcasting.

The board of 15 meets approximately four times a year and in 2006 organized a successful forum on the “Fate of the Newspapers in the Digital Age,” which attracted some 70 students.

“This year, we decided to do something different,” said Term Instructor and Internship Coordinator Michael Dickerson. “We decided to survey [Mason] students, see who they were voting for and what their interests were.”

The students included in the project have been mostly freshmen. Because the survey was run through the Communication Department, Communication 100 and 101 students were the primary targets for the pollsters.

Student Body President Drew Shelnutt and Vice President Ijeoma Nwatu were much involved in the process, with Shelnutt actually administering the survey questions to the participants. In an effort to create a low-stress, open and honest environment in which students felt free to express their views, faculty were entirely excluded from the survey process that took place in the Student Government office.

Faculty member Melinda Villagran, also from the Communication Department, trained the president on how to properly conduct the survey, which consisted of four to five questions.

The first question asked was, “Are you planning to vote in the 2008 presidential election?” With the next question geared toward non-voting students, the questionnaire asked what the reasoning was behind not voting. The third question asked, “What are some of the major issues that you consider important?” The final question was, “If you are not planning to vote, what would motivate you to change your mind?”

The first focus group met on Dec. 6 of last semester and brought in 13 students, while the second, which convened on Feb. 5, had 15 attend.

Dickerson says that the Communication Department would prefer no fewer than 12 participants and invites 15 to “see what [they] can get.”

The third and final survey is scheduled for some time in mid-March, though no definitive date has been set.

Following the surveys’ completion, Dickerson said that the plan is to “put some sort of report together and present it to the candidates on a non-partisan basis.”

He believes that by providing such information, they are “sharing with [the candidates] what we have assessed to be the concerns of the [Mason] students, of a random sampling of them.”

By the end of the semester, the department hopes to have a Wiki, or viral, survey posted online, whereby any student who wished could partake at the click of a mouse. The hope would be to gather as much information from as many people as possible.

Dickerson described the students involved in the surveys as being “very forthright, forthcoming.”

The group also uncovered what were called “substantial” reasons for not voting, as in the case of one student who lived in Norfolk.

In addition, most of the students polled perceived a campus bias towards hosting Democrats rather than Republicans, a notion reinforced by the recent appearances of former Pres. Bill Clinton and Democratic presidential candidate Sen Barack Obama of Ill., who is currently locked in a fight for the Democratic nomination with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Many students are not aware that school administration does not always decide who comes to Mason to speak, but rather that individual school organizations, such as the College Democrats, also play a very large role in drawing guest speakers.

Another popular belief was that the candidates who visited Mason had “canned” presentations and that they did not do enough to adequately speak to the youth of the country. Many students who did vote expressed a desire to keep their decision or even their very act of participation private. Therefore, the surveys are anonymous.