The Culver Public Policy Center hosted its annual Pizza and Policy event last Tuesday in Black Box, where students presented the findings of the 2024 Simpson Political Survey.
The survey, conducted every four years since 2007, was supervised in the Political Research class (POSC 285) by Professor Kedron Bardwell and gathered over 600 student responses, representing about half of the student body.
Jacob Coke, Lincoln Menninga and Ari Ziegler, students in the class, led the discussion on key takeaways from the pre-election poll, where they analyzed the results after the election.
“We learned to examine and identify aspects of political opinion through polling,” Coke said.
The findings revealed a notable shift in student political affiliations, with 41.69% identifying as Republicans, 36.54% as Democrats and 21.76% as independents. These numbers mark a change from four years ago, reflecting the evolving political landscapes at Simpson College.
“We wanted to study students, faculty and staff because just one of these groups does not represent Simpson as a whole,” Coke said.
Coke highlighted several key trends in political ideology and optimism among students.
“The more moderate you are on political positions, the more optimistic you are about the future, or the more extreme you are, and the more ridiculous your ideas are, the more pessimistic your future is looking to be,” Coke said.
Ziegler also noted shifts in beliefs as students progress through their education.
“As people become educated, they change their opinions. And specifically, the trend that we noticed is that they became slightly more liberal,” Ziegler said.
Students also examined how political affiliation fluctuates with national leadership changes.
“After many years of a Democratic administration, public opinion shifts rightward, and after a Republican administration, it shifts leftward,” Coke said.
They also pointed out an interesting trend among health science majors: “The majority of people that answer this were freshmen. Another thing that goes further than that is the majority of freshmen answer this were health science majors,” Ziegler said. “The majority of health science majors are conservative.”
Denise Alvarado Lopez, a sophomore biology major and Culver Fellow, found the distribution of votes between candidates particularly interesting.
“Although the majority is Republican, there still was like a split between the person that they voted for; it wasn’t one candidate had a whole bunch of like votes,” Lopez said.
She also emphasized the importance of independent thinking, stating, “It’s important to know about this, that way we can get our own idea and our own ideologies of what things we support, regardless of what party or candidate it may be, instead of following the crowd.”
Key policy issues such as abortion rights, climate change and gun control were also discussed. According to the survey, 62.25% of students support abortion rights. 55.73% advocate for stricter gun laws, while 38.89% prefer no changes. Additionally, 33.33% support citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
The survey also found that media consumption impacts political perspectives, with most students relying on reliable news sources while a minority uses social media as a primary resource.
Attendees found certain aspects of the survey results surprising. Junior Kate Puderbaugh, a multimedia journalism major, reflected on voter participation among younger students.
“I was a little bit surprised that freshmen were the biggest responders to the poll. I didn’t expect that, but it makes sense because they’re 18, so of age now,” Puderbaugh said. “Also, they’re still kind of holding on to like their ideals, and so maybe they feel more strongly about it.”
The event concluded with a discussion on how political engagement can be encouraged among students.
“This is just one of the different ways that we can bring more awareness to politics and make students not as afraid to be more politically engaged,” Lopez said.
Puderbaugh echoed this by saying, “This is our future. Because literally, everything that they do up there is going to affect us in some way, shape or form.”
With 75% of students having participated in the last election, the survey continues to serve as a valuable tool in understanding and fostering political dialogue on campus.
The last topic they covered in the survey was to gauge students’ hopes for the future, and it was nearly an even split between optimism (48.36%) and pessimism (51.64%).

Watch the SCTV segment to see the full results in detail.