Young voters in the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Virginia ranked the economy as the most important issue in the upcoming election, according to a survey conducted by AU students and published in The Washington Post March 3.
School of Communication professor Jane Hall said her undergraduate "Reporting" class assisted her "Washington Reporting" graduate class in creating a survey that determined youth voting patterns.
Hall said she contacted Jim Brady, Washingtonpost.com's executive editor, a member of the SOC Dean's Advisory Council and a 1989 SOC graduate. He assisted Hall's "Politics and the Media" class as they conducted a survey in cooperation with The Washington Post, which determined youth voting patterns on a national basis. Washingtonpost.com contacted Hall to conduct a survey on the four battleground states.
Students conducted 128 online interviews with 18-29-year-olds from those four states. However, most of the interviewees were actually 18-21. Originally, the survey was supposed to be much like a similar survey The Post published last semester.
"This was intended to be a follow-up but we ended up making up the questions from scratch," said Casey Labrack, a teaching assistant and student in Hall's graduate class. "The Washington Post wanted us to talk about social issues."
Abortion came up as such an important issue that it may voters' decisions, Hall said. However, social issues as a whole didn't ranked as important as issues such as the economy and the Iraq war.
"I expected abortion would take a back seat," Labrack said. "The iron issues of the war and economy are so prevalent right now so social issues get pushed out of the way."
Young voters ranked the economy as the most important issue, followed by the war as second, health care as third and the environment as fourth.
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the leading choice for president among the people surveyed. However, many said they would vote for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., over Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY., if she were to win the Democratic nomination.
In the first survey, many youths said they planned on voting, and this stayed consistent in the second survey, in which many said they either voted or planned to vote in the primaries, Hall said.
The survey was an overall success, according to Hall. Washingtonpost.com credited each of the students at the bottom of the article and eight of the graduate students had bylines on the site.
