Landon maintains lead

As part of an effort to avoid thinking too much about tomorrow's election, I'll return to a 1936 "straw poll" of college students that I wrote about in June.  I had found results for a number of colleges, but I knew that there were more, so I kept looking.  It turns out that the New York Times reported some additional results, mostly in a story of October 30, 1936.  It may seem strange that the Times ran a story on this, but before polls had developed, there was a lot of interest in anything that could provide hints about the outcome of the election.

Here are the additional colleges and universities, ranked from biggest Roosevelt lead on down:

                        Dem    Rep    Soc    Comm
CCNY                     62      4     12      23
New Rochelle             69 29     1       0
Manhattan                66 30      1       0
Rider                    53 43      1       1

Carnegie                 46 49      2       2
Delaware                 47 51      2 0
Drexel                   45 50      3 0
Franklin & Marshall      39 47     13 0
Upsala                   45 53      1 0
Swarthmore               37 48     13 1
Stevens                  38 52      7 2
Wash & Jefferson         25 47     26 1
Bucknell                 35 58      3 2
Penn State               37 60      2 0
Rhode Island             37 61      2 0
Rutgers                  37 62      1 0
Tufts                    32 59      4 4
MIT                      34 60      3 3
Sweetbriar               36 62      2 0
Conn Coll                30 67      2 1
Susquehanna              29 67      3 0
Gettysburg               30 69      2 0
Skidmore                 24 72      4 0
Temple                   20 67      4 9
Mass.                    22 72      5 0
Elmira                   24 73      2 0
Lehigh                   17 77      2 2

Mean                     38     55      4       2

The Vassar list was limited to elite universities, while the New York Times covered a wider range.  Despite this difference, the means were almost the same--today, I think that Republican support would be lower in elite universities than in others.  I wouldn't necessarily put much faith in the results for any particular one--it looked like turnout was generally high at the small colleges, but pretty low at the larger ones, but given the consistency it seems safe to say that college students leaned strongly Republican in the 1930s.