Democrat Hillary Clinton has won the mock presidential election held at her high school alma mater but she failed to clear the 50-percent hurdle among all ballots cast.
Clinton won the school-wide election at Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Illinois — “a wonderful place” — by receiving 49 percent of the total student vote, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Donald Trump, Clinton’s Republican opponent, received just 40 percent of the vote at Maine South High.
The exact vote totals of the Oct. 25 mock election were 770 votes for Clinton and 629 votes for Trump.
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson — at 6 percent — and Green Party candidate Jill Stein — at 4.7 percent — placed well above their real-world voting percentages at Maine South.
The vote took place in the same Maine South hallways where Clinton, 69, walked so ago long as a senior in 1965.
This year’s mock presidential election at the public school was the first one open to all students and not just to seniors.
“Some of them said, ‘I feel weird because I haven’t been paying attention as closely as I should,'” Maine South High social science teacher Sherri Scorza told the Tribune. “I think that was a really good lesson about being an educated voter.”
Students weren’t bashful about sharing their views of the candidates.
“I voted for Donald Trump,” sophomore Matteo Coscino told the newspaper. “I don’t feel like Hillary’s done anything, even though she has political experience.”
Another sophomore, Grace Gallery, disagreed.
“I believe Trump is unfit to be president,” Gallery said. “He has no political experience whatsoever and he doesn’t have any respect for women or people of a different race.”
Senior Emily Donahue observed that “it’s really cool we go to a school that a possible president went to.”
Officials at Maine South say they will submit the mock election results to a group called Voting Opportunities for Teens in Every State (VOTES) 2016, which will tabulate mock election results from teen voters nationwide.
In 2012, America’s teen voters chose President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 50.2 percent to 41.2 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.
Clinton fared much better earlier this month in the 2016 Scholastic News Student Vote — a mock election open to students from kindergarten through 12th grade. The former first lady received 52 percent of the overall vote in Scholastic’s national student poll, which has accurately predicted the winner of every election since 1960. (RELATED: This Presidential Poll Has Forecast Every Election Since 1960. The Winner For 2016 Is…)
Trump came in second in the Scholastic vote with just 35 percent of the vote. (The remaining 13 percent of the Scholastic vote is spread across a larger-than-usual throng of write-in candidates.)
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