On Tuesday, a week before America votes, Gloucester High School students voted for who they’d vote for if they could. And the results were quite a shocker.
The results showed that Republicans Donald Trump and JD Vance beat Democrats Kamala Harris and Tim Walz by 283 to 269 and also won the electoral college 56 to 11, with one extra vote for independent candidate Shiva Ayyadurai.
Democrat Elizabeth Warren also remained Senator and all five ballot questions passed.
What we can determine from these results is despite Democrats dominating Massachusetts politics, and despite President Biden winning over 60% of Gloucester’s votes in 2020, Gloucester High School students are more conservative than it seems from afar. Many think that Massachusetts is liberal and even quite progressive, and indeed it is, but Gen Z students really don’t appear to align with that stereotype. But these results greatly reflect the overall state of the country. We as a nation are incredibly divided today and the national election, much like the mock election, could be decided by just a narrow margin, just a few hundred or a few thousand, or even a few dozen votes.
Additionally, we saw the effects of split-ticketing in the election. Trump won the presidency in the mock election, but Democrat Elizabeth Warren defeated John Deaton to stay a senator. This is a very common occurrence. In Ohio for example, the once purple swing state is now becoming dramatically more conservative and incumbent Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown is fighting to regain his seat by distancing himself from the Biden-Harris ideology and policies and positioning himself as an independent, or even quite conservative. Split tickets are not only real and common and the mock election portrays that very accurately.
And finally, we saw in the mock election the results of voting for a third party. Socialism and Liberation candidate Claudia De la Cruz and Green party candidate Jill Stein came up short in the election, but seemingly took away many liberal votes from Kamala Harris, and that is exactly the Democrat’s top fear. In 2016 Jill Stein took away the progressive camp from Hillary Clinton and now with progressives angry at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over their handling of Israel-Gaza and other issues, it could help Trump secure a victory nationally with the left-wing splintered between moderates and progressives.
So are the mock election results the writing on the wall for what’s to come next week, or will Kamala Harris actually defeat Donald Trump in the election? We can’t wait to find out as election day looms just six days away.
