The University of Delaware's Blue Hen Poll was sent out the day after the 2024 presidential election and received answers from just over 1,000 randomly selected students, staff and faculty.
Students in UD’s Public Opinion and Democracy class selected the survey topics, analyzed the data and created visualizations to help them report on the UD community’s response to the presidential election.
Dr. Lindsay Hoffman has been leading the poll since 2015, and she says not only does the process teach students about sampling bias and developing survey questions, but the poll itself also presented some noteworthy findings.
One category students decided to specifically hone in on was reproductive healthcare.
Among Kamala Harris voters, abortion was selected as the top issue in influencing their decision on which candidate to vote for.
Yet, among Trump and Harris voters, an overwhelming majority of respondents answered “I don’t know” to knowledge questions about abortion.
“The fact that we do have such misperceptions at a university with faculty, staff and students, on some basic aspects of reproductive health is, I think, rather surprising. Especially given that over 60% of the respondents strongly agreed that they had a good understanding of what the key issues were," Hoffman said.
Additionally, 95% of Kamala Harris supporters believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases while 52% of those who voted for Trump believe the same.
Hoffman noted one question in particular that stood out to her was how stark the contrast is between Harris voters and Trump voters when it comes to how confident they are in Trump’s ability to lead.
“It's one of these really lopsided bar graphs where it's almost like a mirror image of the other in that Harris supporters and Trump supporters could not be more different in their confidence in Trump's ability to lead.”
The poll revealed 64% of Harris voters say they are "not at all confident" in Trump’s ability to lead while 72% of Trump voters are "very confident" in his leadership.
Hoffman does keep one of the categories consistent every year, which is questions around discussing controversial issues on campus.
She says compared to last year, the poll reflects an uptick in respondents feeling more comfortable sharing their political views with their friends.
"Last year, the most frequent response was 'somewhat comfortable' with friends. In this case, we have about 44% saying that they're 'extremely comfortable' talking about politics with their friends, and they're slightly more comfortable having a conversation with someone with opposing views than last year, that went up to about 11% saying 'extremely comfortable,' compared to 9% a year ago," Hoffman explained.
The new data also shows Harris supporters largely feel more comfortable sharing their views on controversial political topics than Trump supporters.
"This is pretty consistent across college campuses. Across the country, we have conservative students or republican students being more likely to say that they're reluctant to speak up in the classroom for fear of being judged by other students or by their professor. There has been some research — some exploratory research — that has shown that when students are interviewed about actual times that they've actually been ridiculed or made fun of or called out on for their beliefs, they don't actually have a specific instance of experiencing it, but they feel that they are sort of outsiders sometimes."
Hoffman does note that around 22% of respondents answered "strongly agree" believing that UD is welcoming toward students of ideologies, with around 35% answering "somewhat agree."
77% of respondents were undergraduate students, 1% were graduate, 15% were staff and 6% were faculty.
40% of respondents were in the College of of Arts & Sciences, 70% were female, 84% were white and 57% identified as liberal or very liberal.
