By Annie Mott '16
On March the first, Severn held its own Super Tuesday, of sorts. Students were sent out a link to a survey that contained all questions pertinent to this election, from abortion rights, to foreign policy, to a pseudo-election itself. The results-- surprising. Severn, a historically conservatively-dominated student population (the last Severn election had students in a happy uproar as Romney won in a landslide), has chosen a candidate that rejects every definition of the word. To put it frankly, if Severn were America, we’d all be feeling the Bern.
In a historic turn of events, self-declared Socialist Bernie Sanders has received the most votes, with 28.57% of the school in support. Granted, it’s not a majority, by any means, but if you had told me two weeks ago that almost one-third of Severn students would want Bernie to win the election, to put it mildly, I would not have believed you. Hilariously, 4% of students wrote in the “Other” category that they wanted none of the candidates to win, and one person wrote that they would rather move out of the country than have any of them as president.
What’s most interesting, though, about this question, is when you compare it to who Severn students actually think are going to win the election:
Hillary Clinton, with 54.19% of the votes, is the clear winner. Only 18.29% of students want HRC to win the election, but over half of them think she will. Trump was a solid second in both categories, with exactly one-fifth of students in favor of him, and 12.4% more thinking he is going to be the next president. Of course, someone did write that they hoped none of them would win because in their opinion, they’d all be ‘absolutely horrific.’ I don’t doubt that a few other people agree with you, Anonymous.
Students didn’t just stop there in their liberalism, though. When asked if they support Donald’s wishes to build a wall between Mexico and the US (and whether Mexico should pay for it), 68.33% of students said no-- and only 14.44% thought that it was a logical plan for Mexico to pay for it.
When confronted with the issue of abortion, a hot topic considering the recent closure of countless Planned Parenthoods across the country and the (majority of the) GOP’s attempt to close more and pass legislature allowing increasing restrictions on abortions, an overwhelming majority was on the pro-choice side. Only 4.44% of students felt that there should be no abortions ever, no exceptions-- leaving 95.56% in favor of at least some degree of pro-choice. 59.44% of students felt that they were pro-choice, regardless of the situation.
The next question tackled a hotly-debated topic of economics: the minimum wage. Surprisingly, almost half (44.13%) of students believe that yes, it should be raised, and only 31.84% thought it shouldn’t. 24.02% of students said that they didn’t know enough to answer the question, which is actually a pretty hopeful statistic. Over a quarter of kids who didn’t think they had enough information to answer the question actually admitted it, instead of forming an opinion based on others’ without bothering with the facts (something that, unfortunately, happens all too often in politics).
The greatest thing about these results is that the voters on each of these questions were pretty much bi-partisan-- that is, to say, that there wasn’t a clear majority of Republicans or Democrats in this pool. 32.58% of voters said that they were Republicans, 35.96% of voters said they were Democrats, and in a surprisingly large representation, 26.4% were Independents. There was even one voter who told me that they were an Anarchist, and that they were ‘serious, Annie, don’t disregard this.’ There was no real party skew to the data-- but if you were to look at all the data without knowing this, you’d say this was probably a poll taken pretty much by only liberals. The truth: the party sizes were pretty evenly split. It is true that not everyone in the upper school took the survey, but the more interesting result is that the students of two major parties who, historically, are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum actually agree on more issues than one would think.
Quite honestly, the only thing I can truly come up with to summarize this election is that, one, this is pretty much the weirdest election of all time so far-- in real Donald-Trump-is-probably-the-GOP-candidate life, and in Severn-School-picks-Bernie-Sanders life-- and, two, everyone at Severn is a lot more liberal than we (or at least, I) thought. Go figure.
-Annie Mott ‘16
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