Mock election results were released the morning after Election Day. In the US Presidential race, former president Donald Trump won the federal election with 312 electoral votes. Current vice president Kamala Harris lost with 226 electoral votes. Yet for our school, the data came out significantly similar to the national results.
The school’s results ended up as 43% of votes for Harris, compared to the national percentage being 48.1%. For Donald Trump, he earned 50.9% of the school’s votes and 50.2% nationally.
“I think that it was one of those things too, where… when you’re looking at [it] we have over 3000 students in the school, and then we had a little over- I think we had about 1300 students come in and vote,” librarian Renea Canales said. “And so I would say that it was something that looked very similar to the actual election.”
“I think it matches very well with the actual results of the election which President Trump won, and it also corresponds very well to Texas as a whole… since Texas is a very Republican conservative state,” senior Aletheia Bala said, “it would make sense that there would be more voting towards Trump.”
The mock ballot also mirrored the real ballot, allowing students to vote for their state senator and railroad commissioner. However, it can be assumed that the lesser known the positions were, the more different voter distribution in the school was from state results.
“I think it shows that party loyalty does not exist amongst high schoolers, whoever did the mock election. Because once again, lesser known candidates did not perform very well,” senior Tristen Hoffman said.
“I think what’s also really surprising is that, despite Texas being very Republican, San Antonio in general is very like democratic heavy. Since it’s a very urban area, I think it’s very surprising that, like a lot, more students are voting more towards Trump rather than Harris, which is also strange because a lot of us also voted for Biden on the last election term,” Bala said. “Which means that we have, we don’t have a lot of party loyalty in this school, and a lot of them could just have been upset or unsatisfied with the current Biden administration.”
For instance, Republican Christi Craddick was elected railroad commissioner with 55.7% of votes, whereas in Johnson she received only 44%.
“Name recognition is big; not very many of us here at Johnson know about the candidates,” Hoffman said.
Nonetheless, Canales still noticed that a lot of students were very engaged in the mock election.
“The students were really wanting to come in if their social studies didn’t get to do it. They specifically requested to come in,” she said. “And that was really cool to see students like seeking out to even if it wasn’t something that they were legally allowed to go out and do.
The Monday before Election Day, several social studies classes headed to the library to cast their ballots, but if they could not make it, there was also an option online.
“I loved seeing that students were so interested that they were having conversations about things in a really great and… civil manner and stuff, and having discussions even based off some of their classroom discussions,” Canales said. “And so those are some things that were really, really great to see.”
