Editor's note: This story is part of a series on the Duke community based on a survey conducted by The Chronicle between Oct. 16 and 18.
Ahead of Election Day, The Chronicle is releasing a multi-part series on the results of our 2024 campus elections poll.
We surveyed members of the Duke community about their voting plans and top issues for the 2024 presidential election and North Carolina gubernatorial election. Questions ranged from opinions on the North Carolina 12-week abortion ban to student debt relief efforts.
Summary statistics
We asked respondents about their Duke political affiliations, top issues, race and ethnicity, gender identity, religious identity and more.
Political affiliation
An overwhelming majority of respondents — 88.74% — are planning to vote in the 2024 presidential election. About 2.35% of all respondents are not voting for reasons other than age and citizenship status.
About 87.37% of respondents are registered to vote, 2.45% were eligible to vote but had not registered at the time of the survey, 8.33% are not voting because of their citizenship status, 0.59% are not voting because they are less than 18 years old and 1.27% of respondents were unsure about their registration status.
Respondents were asked for their political identifications, from a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” with 30.56% of respondents identifying as “very liberal,” 41.53% identifying as “somewhat liberal,” 18.41% identifying as moderates or centrists, 7.44% identifying as “somewhat conservative” and 2.06% identifying as “very conservative.”
Overall, 47.01% of all respondents regardless of voter registration status were registered as Democrats, 4.9% as Republicans, 29.97% as Independent/unaffiliated, 0.59% registered with another party and 17.54% were not registered or not eligible to register.
Of those who are registered to vote, 52.68% were registered as Democrats, 5.48% as Republicans, 33.63% as Independent or unaffiliated voters and 7.56% were ineligible to register under a party in their registered state. Two respondents of the 913 registered voters were Green Party members, one registered under the Libertarian Party, one was unsure and two more were registered under an unspecified party.
About 84.42% of those who registered to vote were registered in North Carolina. Among these voters, 57.1% were registered as Democrats, 5.58% as Republicans, 36.79% as unaffiliated voters and 0.53% registered with another party.
This is generally more registered Democrats and fewer registered Republicans compared to the rest of North Carolina and across the country. As of September 2023, North Carolina had about 7.3 million registered voters. About 33% of registered voters were registered Democrat, 30% were registered Republican, 36% were registered unaffiliated and 0.71% were affiliated with another party.
We also asked respondents to check their top five issues. Abortion, climate change, the economy, gun control and democracy were the top five issues across all respondents, while LGBTQ+ issues, crime, race relations, student debt and drug legalization were in the bottom five issues.
Demographics
About 64.15% of respondents were undergraduate students, 18.02% were graduate or professional students, 11.26% were faculty members, 6.17% were staff members and 0.39% reported another Duke affiliation.
Of the respondents, 57.59% were women, 39.76% were men, 1.86% were genderqueer or nonbinary, 0.29% were agender and 0.49% identified with a different gender identity.
About 62.1% of respondents identified as white, 7.74% identified as Black or African American, 12.05% identified as Hispanic/Latinx, 26.44% identified as Asian, 0.78% identified as American Indian or Alaskan Native, 0.2% identified as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and 2.94% identified as Middle Eastern/North African and 1.37% self-identified with another identity.
About 38.5% of respondents identified as Christians: 14.01% were Catholics, 16.65% were Protestants and 7.84% identified with another Christian denomination. About 26.64% of respondents were agnostics, 15.38% were atheists, 0.98% were Buddhists, 3.62% were Hindus, 8.62% were Jewish, 2.06% were Muslims and 4.21% identified with another belief system.
Survey methodology and limitations
The survey was administered from Oct. 16 to 18. A total of 1,021 respondents fully completed the survey, and 258 respondents answered at least one question. Only complete responses were analyzed. Three $100 prizes were randomly awarded to respondents with fully completed responses who opted into answering eight additional questions about specific political issues.
The Chronicle verified that respondents were members of the Duke community by cross-referencing respondents’ NetIDs with the Duke directory. Surveys were manually edited to correct the NetID for respondents who mistakenly entered their unique ID instead.
Fewer than 1% of faculty members, staff members and graduate/professional students started and finished the survey. About 11.2% of undergraduates started the survey, and 9.81% of undergraduates completed the survey.
In total, this year’s survey asked 14 questions, with eight additional questions posed to respondents who wished to be entered into a raffle for a $100 prize.
The survey was promoted via The Chronicle’s Daily Rundown and elections newsletters, social media channels and other emails to Duke community members.
Of the 258 respondents who started but did not complete the survey, 144 stopped after certain questions and did not answer subsequent ones, particularly after those at the end of sections. We also dropped 114 responses that skipped certain questions but answered subsequent questions. For instance, 12 respondents answered that they were registered to vote but did not enter a state they were registered in.
The phrasing of the questions may have inadvertently introduced ambiguity, potentially influencing the reliability and validity of the data. For example, one question asked respondents who opted to answer additional questions about what they believed were the top three causes of inflation. Although the intent was to address the spike in inflation that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, respondents might have seen it as a question gauging what they believed caused inflation in general.
We used questions from national polls to better compare the Duke community’s beliefs with the beliefs of Americans at large. For the two questions gauging opinion on the amount of aid sent to Israelis and Palestinians, we used Gallup’s wording in its November poll on the Israel-Hamas war. Our question on inflation was based in part on YouGov’s November 2022 poll on what Americans believe the causes of inflation are. Our two questions on immigration were based on Gallup’s questions asked from 2006 to 2015 and from 2016 to 2024.
Below, we compare our survey data with the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System’s reported data and publicly available data from the University Registrar. This shows how The Chronicle’s survey responses may differ from the overall breakdown of demographics.
Comparing gender and race to official Duke data
The faculty and staff comparisons below are based on IPEDS data for full-time employees. Although IPEDS provides tables covering all staff by employment status and occupational category, only full-time staff data is broken down by race and gender.
Female respondents were somewhat overrepresented among undergraduates compared to the U.S. News report on Duke’s undergraduate gender distribution in fall 2023. Similarly, women were overrepresented among the small sample of staff members compared to the 2022 IPEDS report on full-time non-instructional staff; however, this discrepancy could be attributed to the low sample of staff members.
In terms of racial identity, the IPEDS report and Duke’s undergraduate student breakdown do not include a separate category for individuals identifying as Middle Eastern or North African. For this comparison, individuals in this category were grouped with those identifying as white, in alignment with common practices in most census classifications. Respondents with an unlisted racial identity were excluded from the following comparison.
While the University provides a Duke Facts dashboard on its graduate/professional students, about a third of the students reported are grouped as “foreign,” while the remaining students were classified by race and ethnicity. About 10% of our graduate/professional respondents could not register to vote because of their citizenship status, but it’s unclear if this definition aligns with that of “foreign” as listed on the website.
White respondents were overrepresented among undergraduates compared to the Registrar’s 2024 dashboard on ethnicity trends of Duke students who self-disclosed their identities, and every other race except Hispanic/Latinx is underrepresented. White respondents were also overrepresented among the staff and faculty members who filled out the survey, as were people who identified as two or more races, although this could also be affected by the small sample size of faculty and staff respondents.
These imbalances in representation likely skewed the data. For instance, male and white respondents are more likely to report that they are conservative or Republicans, both nationally and in our sample.
A PDF of the questionnaire is embedded below.
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Audrey Wang is a Trinity senior and data editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume. She was previously editor-in-chief for Volume 119.