For the past couple of weeks the polls for the presidential election in the United States have gone haywire. Given both the abundance of polls and how President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney are continually switching back and forth in swing states and in the national popular vote, no one really knows whether to trust any of the polls or not. Do we really need yet another poll?
The results of the Scholastic Student Poll were released today, and 51% of the poll's respondent's chose to re-elect Obama, with 45% going to Romney, and remaining 4% going to other candidates. They predicted that Obama would win all of his 2008 states minus Indiana and Virginia, but would pick up Arizona and South Carolina. Only young people below the age of 18 could participate in the vote.
Why is this vote significant? After all, who cares what kids think...right? I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the result: the Scholastic Student Vote has correctly predicted the outcomes of 16 of the past 18 elections. The only two they got wrong were 1948 and 1960 - backing Thomas E. Dewey and Richard Nixon over the victors in each election; neither of these are surprising given how the polls showed that Harry S. Truman was supposed be defeated in 1948, and the 1960 election was incredibly close with John F. Kennedy winning only 0.2% more of the popular vote over Nixon.
I am glad that the vote does spark young peoples' interest in politics; with the way adults often behave, I'm inclined to trust kids more - in a variety of circumstances! Will the Scholastic Student Vote correctly predict the results for the seventeenth time? We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
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