This post was written by Hatchet Staff Writer Catherine Moran.
While young voters in Nevada and South Carolina today were busy participating in the Democratic caucus and Republican primary respectively, 500 GW students voiced their opinions as well.
Bernie Sanders and Marco Rubio won the College & University Straw Poll (CUSP) 2016 held in the Science and Engineering Hall this afternoon.
Several political student organizations came to the event, including GW Roosevelt Institute, GW Students for Rubio, The International Affairs Society, GW College Democrats, GW College Republicans and GW for Bernie.
For Democrats, Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) won with 205 votes, 25 more votes than Hillary Clinton (D-NY), who had 180.
For Republicans, Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) came in first with 39 votes. John Kasich (R-Ohio) came in second with 16 votes. New York Businessman Michael Bloomberg was voted fifth with 6 votes as a write-in option.
Out of the 500 total voters, around 70 percent identified as Democrats.
A large majority of the CUSP voters identified as white, falling in a 65 to 70 percent range. Minority categories, such as Asian, African American, Hispanic, each represented less than 10 percent of the voters.
Swetha Kareti, the freshman representative for GW for Bernie, said that the Sanders win was expected because his policies, such as free college, resonate with students.
“Obviously, this will be indicative of a larger change in our politics in this country as more young people go out and say ‘I matter. The things I talk about do matter,’ and hopefully, we will see this in the primaries as well,” Kareti said.
Voters also ranked the issues they thought were most important in the election, with the economy deemed most important at 33 percent. Women, LGBTQ and minority issues came in second at 21.6 percent, followed by foreign policy at 16 percent, climate change at 14.7 percent and healthcare at around 5 percent.
After the results came out, a six person panel moderated by Lauren Brown, the program director for the Graduate School of Political Management, and Andrew Desiderio, a junior in the School of Media and Public Affairs, discussed the results.
Brown said that for the top five ranked issues, Democrats mostly chose climate change, while Republicans voted for foreign policy as their top issue. Together, though, their votes for the economy pulled it to the top of the list overall.
Brown also went on to say that based on the voters’ party identifications, Clinton won among self-described Democrats, while Sanders won among self-described Independents.
Christian Miller, the public relations director for College Republicans, said that Rubio appeals to a younger crowd probably because of his young age among the Republican candidates and also because of his charismatic personality.
“Credit to where credit’s due, the GW for Rubio group does a lot of solid work,” Miller said. “They have a fantastic ground gang here at GW, and they definitely get people out.”
