This month has influenced youth voters to favor Barack Obama and John McCain, a recent college survey confirmed.

The first survey, taken between Dec. 30 and Jan. 2, was labeled “pre-primary” results; the latter was taken days before Super Tuesday.

The two-part survey indicates

Barack Obama is favored by college students with a 59 percent approval rating while competitor Hillary Clinton has an 18 percent approval rating. Obama’s approval rating increased 17 percent since the start of the primaries while Hillary’s approval rating has increased one percent.

University of Massachusetts students were highly opinionated on the candidates.

“I think lots of college students voted for Obama because he is black or for Hillary because she is a woman,” said UMass sophomore Kristeen Petit-Frere. “Students shouldn’t vote for this reason. It would make more sense if they researched their policies and what they stood for and then made a decision. Personally, I think it showed Hillary showed weakness when she cried during the New Hampshire primary.”

UMass freshman Priti Patel said, “If you look back in history, black people were given the right to vote before women were along with other rights, so I figure that America will be more willing to vote for a black man before they are willing to vote for a woman.”

Super Tuesday passed, and Hillary led with 823 delegate votes while Obama amassed 741.

“Hillary is too polarizing. She claims to a Democrat, but she takes a lot of conservative stances,” said UMass freshman Josh Delaney. “She is anti-video games and anti-atheism. Also, I don’t feel that she could abide by separation of [church and] state.”

Many college students heavily favor Obama, but their votes were not enough for Obama to come out on top after Tuesday’s primaries.

For the Republicans, Rudy Giuliani was favored at 22 percent before the primaries began, and McCain wasn’t far behind with 17 percent.

In addition, Sen. Ron Paul had 13 percent of the vote, Sen. Mike Huckabee had 10 percent, Mitt Romney had 5 percent, Fred Thompson had 3 percent and Duncan Hunter came out with zero percent.

A month later, right before Super Tuesday, Giuliani, Thompson, and Hunter had dropped out of the race, while McCain was favored with a 34 percent approval rating followed by Huckabee with 16 percent, Paul with 14 percent and Romney with 9 percent.

“The least liked Republican candidate at this campus would probably be McCain because he is pro-life,” UMass junior Evan Burns said. “The UMass student body would most likely disagree with this because of how liberal they are.”

“I don’t like Huckabee because he was a minister of a church, he is anti-evolution and supports creationism in schools” said Delaney.

“I am not in favor of any of the Republican candidates because they will probably continue Bush’s foreign policies,” said graduate student Krishna Melnattur.

Since Super Tuesday, McCain holds the majority of the delegate votes with 714 while Romney followed with 286. Huckabee had 181 delegate votes, and Paul had 16. There has been a doubling in support for John McCain since Rudy Giuliani dropped out of the race.

Between Dec. 30 and Jan. 3, 1,254 online interviews were conducted for the pre-primary wave.

An addition 1,000 interviews were conducted between Jan. 31 and Feb. 3. Results were weighted to reflect the demographic composition of college students nationwide, according to statistics published by the National Center for Educational Statistics.

Joshua Walovitch can be reached at [email protected].