I felt like I had failed in my pursuit of information. I had committed myself to figuring out what was driving the political engagement of my fellow classmates, and I was still no where close to having a true gauge of the opinion of the majority of students. I went through the process of my poll in my head several times. With only a few days for it to circulate before the project deadline approached, my poll was still a long way away from the “100 responses” threshold that I had originally set out for. 

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Theoretically, there are ways that I could have reached more people. I could have posted my poll in the “UMich Class of 2022” Facebook page that has nearly 10,000 members. I could have asked my friends in Greek Life and student orgs to post the poll in their group chats. I could have reached out to my professors and asked them to email the poll to their students and ask them to fill them out. But at the time I told myself that simply sending out the poll to my friends would be enough to get viable results.

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I was severely limited in the type of person that filled out my poll. My original intent was that I would send it to my friends to fill out, and then they would send it to their friends, and so on and so forth. Yet, this meant that the results of the survey were limited to only people in my extended social circle. In my dream scenario, my poll would have circulated far beyond my friend group and reached a diverse group of the general student body. By virtue of all the respondents being friends with me, it was fair to assume that on a basic level every respondent had some level of similarity. The vast majority were men, of generally affluent backgrounds, with generally similar worries and reservations about the role of the government. I came to realize that without a diverse base of poll respondents, no legitimate pollster would ever accept my findings to be accurate, and truly I had trouble justifying to myself that my own results were worthwhile of a careful analysis. 

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As is true with all polls, there was no way to decipher whether or not my respondents were even honest in their responses themselves. The poll I created asked “What policy area most affected your vote in the 2020 Presidential election?” At the time, I thought this was a valid question to gauge what policy issues matter to students. However, this question assumes that students - and their votes -  are driven by policy, rather than personality. The 2020 Presidential election was an opportunity for America to choose between polar opposite personalities. President Trump has a fiery personality, and is willing to shout insults at anyone and anything that gets in his way. President-elect Biden has a much more calm demeanor and tried to campaign off his openness towards every American. To say that all voters voted simply according to policy areas is simply not true, and my poll gave respondents no ability to indicate what factors outside of policy also affected their vote. Realistically, the actual policies typically play a very marginal role in many Americans voting decision.