The voters have spoken. Pay no attention to the fact that most of their voices haven’t changed yet.
Democrat Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States, according to the just-released results of the Scholastic Student Vote. The first female presidential nominee of a major party received 52 percent of student votes nationwide, compared to 35 percent for her Republican rival, Donald J. Trump. Thirteen percent voted for "others," including two percent who voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
Clinton even won in Georgia, though not by as big a margin. Actual, adult voters here have her trailing Trump in the most recent polls. But among the Peach State's more pint-sized voters, she drew 48 percent to Trump's 37 percent in the Scholastic election (15 percent voted for others here).
“The Scholastic Student Vote is not based on a scientifically designed sample of the student population,” Scholastic, the well-known 96-year-old company that produces classroom magazines, books and other educational materials notes prominently on its web site. “It is an educational activity meant to give students an opportunity to express their opinions about the 2016 presidential election.”
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They’ve been conducting the student vote since the 1940 presidential election; this year, some 153,000 students, ranging from kindergarteners up to high school seniors, voted online or through mail-in paper ballots.
How seriously should we take all of this? Well, the Scholastic presidential vote’s only been wrong twice: In 1948, the student electorate chose Republican Thomas E. Dewey over the winning incumbent president Harry S. Truman (don’t worry kids, even some newspapers famously got that one wrong on election night). And in 1960, they wrongly said that sitting Republican vice president Richard M. Nixon would beat out the eventual winner-in-a-squeaker, John F. Kennedy.
On the other hand, those 13 percent of “other” candidates written in nationwide (a larger percentage than in previous Scholastic Student Votes) included “Mom,” Kanye West, Spider Man and bacon.
M-m-m, bacon. Maybe we should take them seriously!
