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Election '06: Campus women: Ritter Mr. Right
Metro marketing class polls Auraria, predicts November outcome
By Geof Wollerman
gwollerm@mscd.edu

Opinions on Auraria Campus may turn out to be accurate indicators of whom Colorado elects as its next governor, and just which portion of the population will be the deciding factor in the election.

According to a poll conducted by a Metro marketing class on Aug. 4, 56 percent of 199 people polled said they intended to vote for Democrat Bill Ritter, versus 36 percent who said they would vote for Republican Bob Beauprez. Females overwhelmingly supported Ritter, with 67 percent saying they would vote for him and only 25 percent saying they would vote for Beauprez. Males and females were nearly equally represented, as 49.7 percent were female and 50.3 percent were male. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 7 percent.

Months later and less than two weeks before the election, two recent polls reported in The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News show that the Auraria poll was on target in determining which way Colorado’s voters are leaning.

The Denver Post poll, which was conducted for The Denver Post by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research and reported on Oct. 29, had Ritter leading Beauprez 50 percent to 38 percent with a 4 percent margin of error. In that poll, 56 percent of females supported Ritter, and 33 percent supported Beauprez.

The Rocky Mountain News poll, conducted by Ciruli and Associates and reported on Oct. 28, found a larger split between the candidates, with Ritter leading Beauprez 52 percent to 33 percent with a 4.4 percent margin of error. The Rocky Mountain News poll was not broken down by gender.

While the Auraria poll discovered that females were decidedly more in favor of Ritter, it showed that males were split just about evenly between Ritter and Beauprez, Metro marketing student Ken Nelson said, noting that the gender statistics had the strongest correlation to the outcome of the election.

“The female vote (has) the potential to significantly sway the election,” he said.

The two recent polls indicate a slightly tighter race than the earlier Auraria poll, but Nelson is still happy about the accuracy of his class’s project.

“When we tallied everything up … we actually came up with very consistent numbers,” Nelson said. “We didn’t come up with anything that was really out of the ordinary with what other polls had found.”

Nelson and classmate Justin Pardy organized and compiled the poll, but the entire market-research class participated in conducting it. Nelson said conducting the poll was meant to give the students practice using computer software called SPSS, a statistics program used by professional marketers.

“It all just fit with what we were studying, and with the elections coming up it was also relevant,” Nelson said.

The class compiled a questionnaire that asked which candidate people intended to vote for and also which candidate they felt best addressed certain issues. The class then split into six teams that polled 30 people at six different locations on campus.

The target number of respondents was 180 people, but Nelson said a couple of the teams finished early and were able to poll a few more people, putting the total number of respondents at 199.

Nelson said one of things the class was concerned with was getting diversity with the poll. He pointed out that the Auraria population was “more focused” than other polls’ because it was only students. But Nelson also said that because Auraria is a nontraditional campus, it is more representative than other schools.

“If we did the exact same poll at CU, it would have a much narrower swath of the population,” Nelson said. “What you want is diversity, and I think we accomplished that successfully with this poll.”

Respondents in the poll were split nearly evenly between Democratic Party and Republican Party affiliation, 35.7 percent and 36.7 percent, respectively. Of the other respondents, 17.1 percent described themselves as independents and 10.6 percent as “other.”

Despite the even standings between the two major parties, those polled said Ritter best addressed the issues of transportation, higher education, health care, minimum wage and immigration. The two candidates were closest on the issue of immigration, with 49.2 percent saying Ritter best addressed the issue and 43.2 percent saying Beauprez better addressed it.

“There were actually a large number of people who said they usually affiliate with the Republican Party that actually went Democratic on most of the issues,” Nelson said.

However, when Nelson and Pardy plugged this information about individual respondents into the program, the results were consistent with the rest of the poll, Nelson said.