Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the top candidates for college women heading into the primary election, according to Her Campus’s 2020 pre-election survey. The survey, which polled over 500 students, found that 28% of college women would vote for Sanders right now, and 26% for Warren. President Trump took the lead against fellow Republican candidates, with 11% of college women saying they would vote for him right now.
When the respondents were asked to pick their second choice candidate, Sanders and Warren still dominated. However, Joe Biden had a significant increase with 14% of respondents saying that they’d vote for him as a second choice, while Pete Buttigieg (10%) and Andrew Yang (9%) followed.
College women’s strong support for Sanders and Warren is interesting, in light of the fact that college women are more likely to identify as “liberal” (42%) than “very liberal” (25%), and these two candidates can be considered among the most liberal on the current playing field.
In a similar pre-election survey released by Her Campus in 2016 that polled 619 college women, 50% of the respondents were leaning toward Sanders in the primaries over other candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Despite the outpour of praise from young voters toward Sanders, Clinton became the final Democratic presidential candidate competing against Trump, and liberals went on to lose the 2016 election as a whole. This defeat underscores the importance of voter turnout at the polls during the next few months.
According to Her Campus’s pre-election survey, Sanders has managed to maintain the attention of college women with his extensive political resume and policies—but the top-choice candidate can only win with enough voter participation.