In a poll conducted for The Beacon from October 11 to October 14, faculty and students were asked to respond to various questions about the 2016 presidential election. Through the use of Google Forms, the opinions of 118 respondents were tabulated and analyzed.

The home of the Blue Devils does in fact bleed blue, with over a quarter of the survey’s respondents considering themselves to be Democrats. The gap between the Democrat and Republican (23.1%) population was small, with only 3.4% between the two major parties. The top five concerns of the Shore community lie in terrorism (55.6%), national security (50%), education (47.2%), economics (39.9%), and health (38.8%). These issues have been at the forefront of the election, particularly in the first and second presidential debates.

Perhaps the most encouraging statistic founded in this survey is that of the 62.7% of respondents who were not of legal age to vote in this election, 86.4% of them said they would register for future elections. In regards to the tenor of the election, 37.3% of people said that this election has changed their view on politics to some degree. An overwhelming 57.5% of people said that this election has affected their opinion of other people.

Feedback was collected in regards to what words or phrases people associated with Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton. The top three responses for Secretary Clinton are: “email scandal or BleachBit” – 65.7%, “career politician” – 38.9%, and Benghazi – 36.1%. The results for the word association with Secretary Clinton had more range whereas responses to the same prompt for Mr. Trump resulted in close or similar percentages. In fact, there are three pairs of matching percentages. The top three phrases or words associated with Mr. Trump are: “narcissist” – 50.9%, “politically incorrect” – 50.9%, and “businessman or business savvy” – 49.1%.

As it currently stands, in perhaps the most telling of questions, there is a near even split between the respondents’ support of either Mr. Trump (33.9%), Secretary Clinton (33.1%) and neither (33.1%). Neither candidate is leading in this survey, meaning that from a metaphorical perspective, if Shore was its own state, Clinton and Trump would have to focus on securing Shore’s electoral votes in order to win this election.

Though the survey is only a small representation of SRHS’s reaction to the 2016 presidential election, it is our hope that enough data was generated in order to spark discussion about this monumental election. Looking forward, we encourage all readers to view the third debate between the two front-runners which is scheduled for October 19 at 9PM EST.

Thank you to those who participated in this survey, we hope you will consider participating in the second!