POLL: Obama Leads Among Small Children Who Can’t Vote

If only ACORN were still around:

Obama supporters. /ShutterstockObama 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. 

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):

As you  Via Via Scholastic.com

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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