If only ACORN were still around:
Obama supporters. Morgan Lane Photography/Shutterstock
President Barack Obama won the Scholastic Student Vote by a margin of 51 percent to 45 percent over Mitt Romney. The vote polls those under 18 to weigh their preferences in a mock election. More than 250,000 did. Obama took home Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Ohio, while Romney won Virginia.Â
Sadly for the Obama campaign, a certain amendment to a certain document precludes these impressionable nine-year-olds and drunk high-schoolers from casting ballots in the election. Scholastic did emphasize that their presidential poll “may not be official, but its results have often indicated who eventually wins the presidential race” since the mock poll started in 1940. The children surveyed have so far only failed to predict the future twice, with a majority voting for for Dewey over Truman in 1948 (can’t really blame them on that one…), and Nixon over JFK in 1960 (one of the closest US presidential elections ever, and one that many Americans are still convinced was stolen by Kennedy cronies).
The Scholastic vote joins other inconsequential election-year indicators—including eyebrow length, tooth discoloration, and Barack/Mitt Chia Pets—that point to an Obama win in November.
The underage students ranked the most important issues in this elections as the economy, health care, and the war in Afghanistan. Actual registered voters, according to Gallup data this year, generally rank the economy, “dissatisfaction with government,” and health care as their top three, with the war hovering at or below 5 percent.
No word yet on where that 4 percent of uncommitted or third-party child voters stands on Gary Johnson.
Here’s a helpful chart to show you which way non-voting minors break on a state-by-state basis (check out how the candidates are doing with kids in the swing states):
Via Scholastic.com
