Education

This Presidential Poll Has Forecast Every Election Since 1960. The Winner For 2016 Is…

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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has won the 2016 Scholastic News Student Vote — by a yuge, bigly margin.

Scholastic’s national student poll, which has accurately predicted the winner of every election since 1960, shows Clinton receiving 52 percent of the overall vote.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump comes in second with just 35 percent of the vote.

The remaining 13 percent of the student vote is spread across a larger-than-usual throng of write-in candidates.

Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson is the leading write-in candidate. He places third with 2 percent of the student vote.

Socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Green Party candidate Jill Stein finish fourth and fifth, respectively, in the poll.

Scholastic conducted its 2016 presidential poll online and by mail-in paper ballot over the course of a couple recent months. The student news magazine released the poll results earlier this week.

About 153,000 students ranging from kindergarten through 12th grade participated.

Scholastic has conducted its national presidential poll among students every four years since 1940. Since it was introduced, the poll has been wrong only twice. In 1948, America’s students picked Thomas Dewey, who lost to Harry Truman. In 1960, students picked Richard Nixon, who lost a very close election to John F. Kennedy.

Since 1960, the Scholastic student poll has never been wrong — possibly because the quadrennial poll of children roughly simulates the voting preferences spouted by the childrens’ parents.

During the last 56 years, the Scholastic poll has correctly picked Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon (twice), Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (twice), George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton (twice), George W. Bush (twice) and Barack Obama (twice).

For 2016, the Scholastic student poll’s state-by-state results predict an Electoral College blowout with Clinton winning expected battleground states such as Florida and Ohio. She also wins a number of longtime Republican strongholds including Georgia, Texas and Alaska.

In 2012, the Scholastic poll indicated a comfortable win for President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney — 51 percent to 45 percent.

The actual nationwide election result in 2012 saw Obama receive 51.1 percent of the vote. Romney received 47.2 percent of the real vote.

Interestingly, almost 100,000 more students participated in the 2012 Scholastic presidential vote compared to this year’s student vote.

In the 2008 Scholastic vote, Obama walloped Republican John McCain among students by a whopping margin of 57 percent to 39 percent.

McCain did much better in the actual presidential vote in 2012, winning 45.7 of the vote. Obama won 52.9 percent of the real 2012 vote.

Scholastic specifically observes that its polls are not scientific.

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