Union Students Vote for Social Conservatives
Posted Mar 11, 2020
The top three most important issues to participants in the Union Straw Poll are abortion, economy, and religious liberty. If we include traditional values, which is tied for 4th place, we see that 52% of students support social conservative issues.
These results are not surprising since Union is an evangelical university. Abortion is usually the number one issue that evangelicals highlight and this result shows that younger evangelicals continue their commitment to protecting life. The third place support for religious liberty is surprising though. While many evangelicals believe the issue is important, it is not usually an issue that ordinary evangelicals think about. Since Union emphasizes the importance of religious liberty in our changing culture environment, it seems that the larger message is connecting with younger evangelicals as they begin to see it as more important. This support for religious liberty is important because religious liberty ensures that faith based groups can continue to promote its vision of the good society through its words AND deeds. Our faith is not something that it limited to our homes or places of worship, but impacts all of our activities. Since faith based organizations are probably the largest provider of social services outside of the government, it seems that Union students are committed to insuring that our community can continue to help the poor, widow, orphan, and refugee.
In terms of political support, we see that partisans tend to value the issue that it most important to their party. Republicans are four times more likely to support restrictions on abortion and religious liberty, twice as likely to support traditional values, and 2.7 times the economy. It is clear that most of Union's students are Republican voters because of the party's commitment to social conservatism.
Unsurprisingly, Democrats are more focused on Democratic leaning values. They are almost five times more likely to support addressing climate change and health care, twice as likely to name education and economic inequality as the most important issue, and 1.5 times more likely to be concerned with immigration. The support for climate change and health care is not surprising because these two issues are the ones that Democratic candidates speak the most about. By supporting these issues, young evangelicals bring their faith to bear by seeking to protect creation, developing a more holistic view of life (health care and education), and protecting the foreigner among us.
The most important issues for Independents was abortion, health care, the economy, and religious liberty. Most likely, the support for abortion and religious liberty comes from those who are Republican but do not like Trump because of his character flaws. Remember that "A Republican Other Than Trump" received the second number of votes among presidential candidates.
The importance of foreign policy was split equally between the two parties.