When the polls opened Nov. 4, some 130 University of Virginia undergraduate students fanned out across Charlottesville’s nine voting precincts armed with clipboards and paper surveys to ask voters to spare five minutes to answer a few questions.
But they didn’t ask how voters cast their ballots on Election Day. They wanted to know how voters felt about political issues and international affairs.
The data-gathering effort was part of the University of Virginia’s Politics Honors program. Six students spent the fall semester designing eight experiments for the survey to test theories of foreign policy, voter behavior and perceptions of race and politics.
A small group, the half-dozen honors students are chosen from a pool of roughly 300 applicants annually. Alumni regularly win Rhodes, Truman and Marshall scholarships.
“The Politics Honors program is UVA’s ‘top gun,’” said Todd Sechser, the director of the honors program and a professor of international relations. “These students are the best of the best. And we put them through a course of study as rigorous and intensive as anything available at the University.”
The six students who won slots in the UVA Department of Politics’ honors program relax after reviewing their exit poll results. In the front row and from the left, Zach Davidson, Hovsep Seferian, Department of Politics chair and professor Jennifer Lawless, Grace Edelstein and Maryam Ahmed. In the back row, from left, are Kessler Kreutner-Eady, Jada Fontaine-Rasaiah and honors program director and professor Todd Sechser. (Photo by Amanda Maglione)
Sechser and Jennifer Lawless, chair of the Department of Politics and a professor of American politics, organized the exit poll, which they plan to make an annual feature of the program.
What did the students find?
Grace Edelstein flipped the script on local politics and asked voters whether local controversies involving the University shaped their statewide voting decisions.
The results said “yes.” Among those with a close affiliation to UVA, 68% of voters said events over the summer played an important role in their decision to turn out to vote. For those without a UVA affiliation, the figure dropped to 50%. The findings applied to Democrats and Republicans alike.
Student Kessler Kreutner-Eady found that neither positive nor negative information about gubernatorial candidates or polarizing statements from President Donald J. Trump affected voter enthusiasm.
She concluded that voters’ demographic characteristics drove enthusiasm. Women, politically engaged voters, Democrats and higher-income earners were more enthusiastic about their gubernatorial choice, regardless of what information they read.
For student Maryam Ahmed, whether policy endorsements from allies versus adversaries shape public support for policies piqued her interest.
