Students gather to hear mock election results at Northfield Mount Hermon in Gill, Massachusetts. (Photo by Glenn Minshall)
Just like the majority of adult residents, it looks like D.C. high schoolers want Hillary Clinton to be the county’s next president.
Students from four District schools voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in VOTES 2016, the nation’s largest mock election for high schoolers.
Students from Maret, School Without Walls, Coolidge, and Georgetown Day represented the District in the simulation, in which 87.3 percent of them voted for Clinton, according to Michael Timberlake of Finn Partners, which released this year’s data from the annual event. Donald Trump came in second with 4.8 percent of the votes, and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein tied for third with 3.9 percent.
In D.C.’s June primary, Clinton coasted with 78 percent of the vote to Bernie Sanders’ 21 percent.
This year’s VOTES project (which stands for Voting Opportunities for Teenagers in Every State) included 75,000 high schoolers from all 50 states, plus D.C.
The vote was much closer nationally. Jim Shea, a co-founder of the VOTES, points out that less than half of the participants voted for Clinton, at 47.6 percent. Students awarded the Democratic nominee with 332 Electoral College votes compared to Trump’s 206.
“In more than a dozen states, the race was decided by less than 100 votes, even though, in some cases, several thousand votes were cast in those states.” He also pointed to a strong showing of third-party candidates, who won more than 19 percent of the teens’ collective votes. That’s “higher than in any VOTES election since the days of Ross Perot and Ralph Nader,” Shea said, “In at least three states, they played a major role as ‘spoiler’ candidates.”
In the past seven election cycles, the program correctly predicted all victors except George W. Bush in 2004.
The results of the election were revealed last night during a two-hour webcast, which was recorded at Northfield Mount Hermon boarding school in Gill, Massachusetts.
