Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

Ivy League and Female College Students Strongly Prefer Obama 

Today I thought I’d post results from one of our recent college youth ‘GenX2Z surveys’. It seems that few of the surveys and polls out there have an accurate read on this demographic. In terms of background, Anderson Analytics’ GenX2Z panelists are recruited locally at college campuses or on the social networking site Facebook.com. GenX2Z panelists represent well over 400 US Colleges and Universities and all students have confirmed .edu email addresses.

In the survey that we fielded online last week we found that 60% of college students (ages 17-34) prefer Senator Obama while only 25% prefer Senator McCain.

Interestingly, the choice of Sarah Palin does not seem to have helped McCain much among female college students. Females were significantly more likely than their male counterparts to prefer Obama (62.9% of females vs. 55.4% of males preferred Obama while only 23% of females vs. 28.4% of males preferred McCain).

The overall 34% youth vote difference between the two candidates is larger than what has been reported in earlier polls among youth. To benefit from the lead, Democrats need to ensure that these students actually visit the polls on Election Day.

One other point of interest in the data is that while overall six in ten students preferred Obama, this preference was even more pronounced among students at Ivy League institutions, where about eight in ten students favored Senator Obama.

Our methodology allows us to drill down and quickly resample to check for interesting findings. So just to double check this point we sampled an additional n=100 students from Harvard and n=100 from Brown University on Sunday September 28th and found this higher level support for Obama to hold at both of these two specific Ivy league schools as well. In fact eight in ten students favored Obama at his alma mater Harvard University and even more, nine in ten students, at Brown University!

The gender difference was present among Harvard students as well, with 93% of women supporting Obama vs. 72% of men. However, at Brown University the gender gap was almost non existent with 92% of women and 90% of male students supporting Obama. Older students, seniors and graduate students, were also more likely to support Obama.

The overall poll was conducted among 1,000 US College students and yields statistics with a confidence interval of +/-3% at the 95% confidence level.