visited Furman\u2019s campus early on <\/a>in the election season, and the past few weeks have brought all the candidates to the Upstate as their campaigns have crisscrossed the state.<\/p>\nTomorrow\u2019s votes will determine who\u00a0wins in\u00a0South Carolina, but the results are already in for Furman.<\/p>\n
A survey made available to students, faculty and staff members shows\u00a0dark horse Ron Paul finishing first, with about a quarter of the vote. Trailing by a handful of votes is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney with Gingrich and Rick Santorum tied at about 10 percent. Rick Perry, who recently withdrew his bid, captured less than three percent in the Furman poll.<\/p>\n
More than half of the survey takers said the economy was their top issue, followed by the federal budget deficit (21 percent) and healthcare (14 percent). Thirty-seven percent identified themselves as liberal, 34 percent as conservative, 26 percent as moderate, and five percent as libertarian.<\/p>\n
One hundred and forty-five people responded to the survey (64 staff, 60 students and 21 faculty).<\/p>\n
Polling is an imprecise science, but senior political science major Will Hinson, leader of the Paul campaign on campus, says he\u2019s not surprised at Paul\u2019s popularity among students\u00a0who are concerned for their\u00a0futures as they prepare to graduate.<\/p>\n
According to Hinson, Paul\u2019s foreign policy stance, which differentiates him sharply from his competitors, has more appeal among collegiate audiences, for whom\u00a0debates on future policy often have the greatest implications.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m in the Marine Corps,\u201d Hinson\u00a0says, \u201cand if anyone but Ron Paul gets elected I\u2019ll probably be in Iran in a few years. On the economy, young people see that Ron Paul\u2019s the only one taking the debt seriously because he\u2019s the only candidate that plans on cutting the Federal budget by trillions and eliminating five extraneous departments.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JANUARY 20, 2012
\nby Sarah Morano \u201914, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n
A survey made available to students, faculty and staff members shows\u00a0dark horse Ron Paul finishing first,\u00a0with about a quarter of the vote.\u00a0Trailing by a handful of votes is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum tied at about 10 percent. Rick Perry, who recently withdrew his bid, captured less than three percent in the Furman poll.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-politics-and-international-affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}