even more polling data

Come Tuesday millions of US citizens will trek to the polls, waiting hours in line to elect our country's next president. Hopefully you have already figured out that this election is kind of important. Part of that was a poll of RWU students and how they will be voting in Tuesday's election.Keeping that in mind we at the Hawk's Herald thought it was important to see how students here at RWU would be voting.

Included in the latest issue of the Herald is series of election oriented content. Here is some of the content we didn't quite have room for in the paper.

The poll, which surveyed 391 students, looked at among other things including student's party affiliation which revealed some interesting results.


40.6% of students said they are registered independents which trumped registration for all other major parties. National polls suggest that the election will swing on the Independent vote.

With these votes potentially carrying so much weight we took a closer look at RWU's registered Independents to see who they will be voting for next week.


It turns out that Independent voters favor Obama by an overwhelming majority. If McCain loses Independents by anywhere near the margin of our poll then he won't stand a chance in the general election

On a lighter note: my entire life I have been trying to figure how women think to little or no avail. This time I took to the polls in order to break down the presidential vote and party affiliation by gender. What made this interesting was not a series of glaring differences, but the surprising similarity between the sexes. Perhaps we have more in common than realized.

Unfortunately we forgot to mention in our polling piece in the paper that out of 391 students only one was voting for Colbert. Perhaps his influence is waning. To his credit however, he ran even with Bill Clinton-- who also received a vote-- and garnered a fourth of the vote that Ralph Nader collected. We were midly depressed that people took the polling so seriously. What is happening to our country?? Honestly, nobody votes for Micky Mouse anymore.

Keep checking the blog for breaking election coverage. On election day we will be blogging live from some interesting election locations, so tune in.

RWU students favor obama

we did a poll of 391 RWU students to find out how they might be voting next Tuesday and got some interesting results:

it turned out that 84% say they will be voting next week.

we broke down those likely voters and here is how they will be voting.

72% Obama
22% McCain
5% Undecided
1% Nader
less than 1% others.

Stay tuned for more data! The full breakdown of our poll will be in this weeks Herald.

President's forum

President Nirschel hosted this semester's student forum tonight in CAS. Allison Collins was there and reported on what was a relatively uneventful forum:

"MSU is upset that they don't have an office. The president didn't really give a response to that, except to say that they want to expand the Intercultural Center. The sailing team made an announcement that they won nationals over the weekend, and the Lacrosse and Rugby teams are upset that they still don't have a turf field. They made a big deal out of it. It was definitely the most talked about issue."

Athletics director George Kolb was interviewed for a providence journal article about RWU athletics, published in August of 2007. The article discussed the status of the turf field as it stood over 14 months ago:

"Kolb announced last spring that the school authorized construction of an artificial turf field to replace Bayside Field, home of soccer and lacrosse and is considering options to enhance the baseball and softball fields, which share outfield space now. The projects are on hold as a result of escalating costs and a university master planning process that is under way.

“In the short term it’s disappointing, but in the long term it’s the right decision,” he said

Also announced at the meeting was that RWU's endowment lost an additional 7-8 million on top of the 10 million it had already lost from its high of 114 million in 2007. If our math is on point that means the endowment is currently around 96 million. Due to the global economic crisis such a loss was to be expected. However the loss could lead to a little belt tightening of university spending.

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