2020 Mock Election Recap

Written by Grace Donohue
November 11th 2020

This year’s AP Government and Politics mock election was held during a particularly important and exciting election cycle. Typically, the mock ballots are distributed just to MHS students, but this year, the project was expanded to include both middle school and elementary school students as well. The ballots differed slightly between the schools they were administered in, with the high school ballot being the most advanced and the elementary school ballot the most simplistic. Unsurprisingly for a liberal and highly-educated suburb of Boston, all three ballots came back with Joe Biden with a large margin over incumbent President Trump.
In the elementary school election, only the presidential results were reported, as the senate vote was optional on the google form. Biden took 79.5% of the vote while Trump took 9.8%, the lowest of any school.
The middle school had the most votes cast with a total of 723, which is a very high turnout rate and most likely due to the fact that social studies teachers incorporated the mock election into their lessons on Monday, November 2nd. All MVMMS students watched a pre-recorded video of Grace Donohue, an AP Gov & Politics student, that explained the mock election and the races and questions that were on it. The middle school saw Biden winning by the smallest margin of all three schools, where he took 77.6% of the vote (561 votes) and Trump took 12.7% (92 votes). This is a margin of 64.9%, or 469 votes, a very substantial margin, but still less than the margin at MHS and the elementary schools. The middle school also overwhelmingly voted to re-elect Ed Markey for the US Senate (76.5% of the vote) and Katherine Clark for the US House of Representatives (79.9% of the vote), both democratic incumbents. Clark is a Melrose native with 3 children who have graduated from MHS, so her high margin was unsurprising. Markey, who is from Malden and recently overcame a challenge from Joe Kennedy in the senate primaries, received more than three-quarters of the vote. However, both Markey and Clark’s republican competitors received a greater proportion of the vote than did President Trump in the presidential race. Markey’s challenger Kevin O’Connor came in with 76.5%, and Clark’s challenger Caroline Colarusso (a Stoneham native) received 18.8% of the vote. These discrepancies between the republican votes at the state level and federal level indicate that some voters were splitting their tickets between parties and not all students who voted for republicans in Congress voted for the republican presidential candidate.
MHS had a slightly disappointing turnout of only 309 votes, but the highest margin of victory of Joe Biden of all three schools. Biden took 81.2% of the vote (251 votes) while Trump took 11.3% (35 votes). The correlation between Biden’s margin and voter turnout may suggest that the more students that participate in the mock election, the greater number of votes go to the republican nominee. Since the MHS mock election was optional and not promoted by teachers, this may be explained by the fact that students who are more politically engaged and would be most likely to vote are more likely to be democratic leaning. The difference in voting margin could also be explained by the difference in age between MHS and MVMMS students. MVMMS students are 11-14, and most likely voted how their parents did. High schoolers, however, are old enough to have mostly formed their own political opinions, and young voters are far more likely to vote for democrats than for republicans. High schoolers may be voting differently than their parents were. For the senate seat, Markey took 84.4% of the vote, while O’Connor took 13.6%. In the house race, Clark again came out on top, winning 84.8% of the vote to Colarusso’s 12.6%.
Both the middle school and high school ballots including this year’s ballot questions on right to repair and ranked choice voting. MHS and MVMMS voted ‘yes’ to both questions 1 and 2, with the margin of victory being larger at the high school for both questions.
When comparing the mock election results to the real Melrose results, all three schools skewed more democratic than the actual population. Melrose voted for Biden at a margin of 47 percentage points or 8,567 votes, with Biden earning 72.1% of the vote and Trump 25.3%. Trump’s share of the real vote was twice as large as his share of the vote in all 3 schools. In the congressional elections, all three schools again voted for the democratic candidates at a higher margin than did Melrose’s voting population. These discrepancies suggest that students in Melrose are more left-leaning than the adult population. This is not surprising, as younger people tend to be much more liberal than older people. While it is not known how many students voted differently than their parents, it can be assumed that some margin of the voters did, which resulted in the higher margins of victory for the democratic candidates.