School Election Follow Up
Suspense, questions, and concerns, regarding the outcomes of the 2024 election filled the halls of the Minnehaha Upper School before November 5th. With the nation’s future at stake, the big question remained: “Who will be the leader of America?” On a national level sophomore Bella Bustamante predicted that Donald Trump would win.
“I knew it would be Trump,” said Bustamante. “I would go out into the country and see flags. I would watch lives or debates online and the comment sections would be ‘Trump 2024, save us, make America great again!’”.
In addition to this result assumption, many Minnehaha students were vocal about personal beliefs. Luckily, they were able to express themselves further in a School Wide Election held by the Journalism class at Minnehaha.
Voting was held during the advisory period on Election Day, November 5th 2024. During this time students had the opportunity to fill out a questionnaire detailing the following prompts
- What candidate they would like to vote for
- Commentary for key issues that represented their candidate
- Why they chose this candidate
Interestingly, results within the school community drastically differed from the rest of the U.S population.
Let’s take a deeper look at what the Minnehaha Upper School student body concluded.
The survey showed a high level of participation and interest from young students who make up the school’s community. Some would say it is not important to vote, but Government Teacher, Kayleen Berg, would say otherwise.
“I think it is important to vote as a young person,” said Berg. “Most of our political leaders are older, eventually they are going to be replaced by younger people.”
It seems this advice was taken by students with 344 votes casted out of the student body of 386 (89.1%).
“It’s a good idea to get interested and be making choices now. It’s your right to vote, and it’s a good idea to do it.” said Berg.
Out of the 386 students 216 votes were casted (62.8%) for Harris and Walz leading them to victory within our school community. Although there was commentary on both sides of the trajectory, prior to the School Election many students expressed their confidence in Harris winning.
“Given the state we live in and our particular school community I thought that Harris would win,” said Charlie Kath. “It will be interesting to see more data behind this though.”
The prime issues that Harris advocated were: Abortion (60.9%), Discrimination (41.1%), Health Care (30.7%), Gun Policy (28.6%), and Climate Change (28.1%).
Looking at the data, females were a large part of victory for Harris. 78.6% of females voted for her while only 44.5% of males did. On the other side stands Trump.
Trump and Vance followed with 94 votes casted (27.3%). The top five issues of Trump voters were: Economy (59%), Immigration (42.2%), Abortion (41%), Tax Policy (30.1%) and Crime (21.7%). A low percent of females voted for Trump (13.9%) as opposed to male (42.7%)
The remaining number of votes (9.9%) were casted for the No Vote/Other category.
“It seems like students weren’t included to vote ‘no vote/other,” said Berg. “Everyone has a pretty strong opinion about this election, even if they don’t necessarily pay attention to politics.”
Interestingly, voters as a whole expressed a high level of trust in the outcomes of the election. On the other hand, many were concerned about the violence that would follow.
“In prior experiences of the election, the polls have been wrong and glitched,” said sophomore Charlie Kath. “But if you don’t trust the outcomes, bad things in society, like riots and violence can occur.”
In regards to the senate race, U.S Senator in Minnesota. Democrat incumbent Amy Klobuchar won by 54.4%. Following came republican challenger Royce White receiving 23.3% of votes. Lastly in this category came “No Vote” (18.6%) and “Other” (3.8%).
“I don’t think students were as interested in this election because it is less talked about,” said Kath.