I am taking a college class doing political science. I wrote the following paper. It only took me a little while, but I figured you might at least be a little curious what my writing looks like.
Have fun.
Once you become a working member of the society, you can't help but start to look at the world around you and see how it works. One of the most influential things that has happened to me recently was the presidential election. This has really been the first time that I have been able to look at the candidates and the issues, make a rational decision and vote on what I felt was best.
In elections there are usually two big, influential things that the candidates use to grab the attention of the American public. One is usually a domestic issue and one is usually a foreign issue.
It's pretty obvious at this time that the biggest foreign issue was the war on terror, specifically, the war in Iraq. There have been at least 250,000 soldiers over there fighting for this cause. One of those was my sister, and two others have been very close to both her and I. This issue was one that piqued my interest, and it was the issue that was the most widely talked about by the candidates. The public hears about the issue from both sides. One candidate wanted to leave the troops there (Bush), the other candidate wanted to bring them home (Kerry). Many mothers asked to have their kids come home, while many soldiers actually voiced that they wanted to stay there and get the job done. There were other issues, like the upset in North Korea, however the war on Iraq was the biggest (according to the candidates, the news, the polls and the people) issue before the election.
I did some research on www.cnn.com, and I found that the war in Iraq was the only foreign issue on the list of important issues.
The second influential area is the most important issue domestically in America. I have read several different sources that have said different things, but it appears that before the election, people had their attention mostly on terrorism. That was actually the second biggest area. This does in fact tie into the foreign issue that I was talking about, however terrorism is a very close to home thing, and it can't be considered something that is "out there." According to www.foxnews.com, 25% of the public had terrorism as the # 1 most important issue.
However, I looked at the data from the exit polls on the most important foreign policy issue (at www.cnn.com), and I found that many people that were polled were most concerned about moral values. It held 22% of the public as the most important domestic issue.
On the foreign issue, the polls were dead on, but they were totally off on the domestic issue. I have thought this over, and there could be several reasons that it is that way.
Firstly, it is possible that the people that were surveyed prior to the election didn't all vote, and people may not have been surveyed that did vote. That could be one cause of the reason, but I think that the more important issue is that people change their minds. On Election Day it really is down to business with no more "talk" about how great everything can be. The voter actually has to stand aside and make his opinion known to the rest of the country. At that point it time, his perspectives may change. There is also a lot of last minute campaigning about the issues before the ballots open, and that has a very big impact on the voters.
So, although the polls were correct about the foreign issue, they were quite far off about what the issue here at home was.
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