Obama has just won the election in Ohio. Well, he won AN election in Ohio. We held our mock election at my junior high school this week. Since it was built in 1973, the junior high where I teach has correctly picked the winner of the POPULAR vote for president in every election, including Carter in '76, Clinton in '92 and '96, and gave Gore the edge in '00. The amazing part is that it is in a dead red part of Ohio. The county is overwhelmingly Reepublican. Bush has visited a number of times. Palin was just here last week speaking in our local hockey arena. It's in the district of Minority Leader Boehner. So, how close was the race this year? Follow and find out!
First, we took a different approach this year. We have always just done a popular vote total after requiring students to register the week before the election. This year we divided the school by homerooms and assigned each homeroom a number of electoral votes based on the population of each homeroom to total 538 electoral votes. We had 64% of our students register to vote, and nearly a 100% voter turnout. The race was AMAZINGLY close! There were 413 votes cast. The results of the popular vote.....207-206 Obama! We are currently conducting a mandatory recount before we make the results official. I do not have the exact electoral vote count, but Obama won by about 30 electoral votes. We'll see if the streak is still alive on Tuesday.
In a related note, we also participaed in a national online mock election run by the Youth Leadership Initiative. The results for my school were 54%-40% Obama. The interesting part of this election was looking at the national results and the results broken down by state. You can see the full results for yourself here.
Some things of note, McCain was only able to win 9 states that I could find. He was destroyed in his home state as well as Palin's home state of Alaska. The states McCain won were Lousiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah. That's it! I thought it was pretty cool. I hope you do too.