Blog

Your Education Road Map

Politics K-12®

ESSA. Congress. State chiefs. School spending. Elections. Education Week reporters keep watch on education policy and politics in the nation’s capital and in the states. Read more from this blog.

Federal

Sharp Racial Divide Revealed When Students Vote for President

By Andrew Ujifusa — November 03, 2016 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Many of them are too young to vote, but according to a poll conducted by an ed-tech company, students overwhelmingly prefer Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to Republican standard-bearer Donald Trump in the 2016 election. However, just like in the real presidential contest, there are sharp divides along racial lines.

Clinton got 57 percent of the vote, while Trump got 32 percent, according to a tally of 385,000 students who voted in the Student Vote 2016 presidential poll conducted by Newsela, which aims to build reading comprehension through articles tailored to various grade levels and also provides real-time assessments.

Only students enrolled in a Newsela class could take the poll ... so these results, gathered from Oct. 17 to Nov. 1, are not scientific. The cities with students casting the most votes in Newsela’s poll are Chicago, Portland, Ore., and San Jose, Calif. Newsela’s results do roughly match the numbers from a presidential poll recently conducted by Scholastic, which found that 52 percent of students backed Clinton and 35 percent preferred Trump. (Scholastic’s StudentVote is also not scientific.)

Newsela’s poll found students in 33 states going for Clinton, who successfully poached the kid vote in states that typically the favor the GOP such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. Trump, meanwhile, got the backing of 17 states, including the crucial swing state of Ohio. Clinton also fared best among elementary school students enrolled in Newsela, while the results were tighter in high school, although the former secretary of state still held the edge there.

So about that racial divide: Clinton did extremely well in schools in which at least 70 percent of the students were either black or Hispanic, while Trump got the win in schools that were at least 70 percent white. See for yourself:

Scholastic notes that since 1940, kids participating in its poll have picked the winner in every election except in 1948 and 1960—sorry, Thomas Dewey and Richard Nixon.

Related Tags: