A new poll finds that Democrat candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are the most supported within the party after the recent set of debates.

College Pulse polled 1,500 college students directly after the second night of the Democrat debate on whom they preferred to receive the nomination for the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Sanders and Warren garnered the majority of votes, receiving 28 and 23 percent of the total, respectively.

“Prime victims to the false song of socialism"









Twenty-six percent of college students polled reported that they tuned in to the Democrat debates, which far exceeds the 4.5 percent of the overall American public that watched.

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The recent poll findings seem to affirm the claim that younger voters are becoming more and more left-wing, supporting platforms that resemble socialism, like taxpayer-funded healthcare and increased taxes on wealthy Americans.

“Colleges and universities have severely underprepared non-STEM college students since higher education has moved further and further to the left,” Joel Valdez, former College Republicans member at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, told Campus Reform.

“This lack of proper preparation for the real world makes college students prime victims to the false song of socialism,” Valdez, a former Campus Reform correspondent who currently interns at the Leadership Institute, Campus Reform’s parent company, added. “No wonder the top socialist candidates are leading with underprepared members of society.”

Sanders is known for his socialist platform, even referring to himself as a “democratic socialist.” The Democrat frontrunner among college students has advocated for free college, universal healthcare, and increased tax rates on the wealthy, among other things. He even endorsed providing free healthcare to illegal immigrants as part of his plan.

“What being a socialist means is,” Sanders said about his socialist ideals, “that you hold out...a vision of society where poverty is absolutely unnecessary, where international relations are not based on greed...but on cooperation...where human beings can own the means of production and work together rather than having to work as semi-slaves to other people who can hire and fire.”

[RELATED: VIDEO: Even college students call millionaire Bernie Sanders a ‘hypocrite’]

“Bernie’s message appeals to so many college students because he talks about government-subsidized programs such as free college and healthcare,” Secretary of the College Republicans chapter at Grove City College, Libby Kreiger, who also works as a Leadership Institute intern, said. “Free does not mean free, because we would all be paying exponentially more in taxes to cover the new benefits, and the fact that many college students don’t realize this is scary.”

Although she has never outright claimed to support socialism, Warren has many policy proposals that parallel Sanders’ agenda. The Massachusetts senator supports taxing the rich, student loan debt relief programs, free college, and universal healthcare.

“The top 0.1 percent of American families -- the richest one in 1,000 -- now have nearly the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90 percent of American families combined. Meanwhile, for everyone else, opportunity is slipping away,” Warren said to justify her plan of taxing the rich, according to Bloomberg. “We need structural change to fix it.”

Support for more moderate Democrats, like former Vice President Joe Biden, dropped from 17 to eight percent of college students following the debate, according to the College Pulse poll. Biden also lost support among the general public after the debate but still led with the support of 27.2 percent, according to a Real Clear Politics poll .

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