Article by Ben Card, Newspaper Club Editor
Incumbent president Barack Obama is the clear winner of the Newspaper Club’s 2012 Political Survey, taking 58.9% of the votes and underlining a liberal trend among high school students, even those in Hopkinton.
Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and the Republican challenger, trailed far behind President Obama, garnering only 27.4% of the vote to the president’s 58.9%. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 6.1% of the votes, while fill-in candidates, including Green Party nominee Jill Stein, took the remaining 7.6%. That Governor Romney finished over thirty points behind the president belies the close competition between the two candidates in the national forum, where every percentage point in the polls represents a hard-fought battle as the November 6th election approaches.
The survey was facilitated by the Newspaper Club and distributed at lunches on the 1st and 2nd of October. Almost 200 student responses, which reflected a fairly representative sample of all four grades, were recorded. It polled a number of topics not restricted to the presidential candidate.
When asked to rank their own interest in politics with a number from one to ten, freshmen averaged a 5.1 on the scale, denoting a marginally above-average interest. Interest rose with grade level to an average of 5.88 for sophomores and 5.98 for juniors, and then spiked to 7.20 for current seniors. The class of 2013 also logged over 60% of the school-wide votes for Libertarian Gary Johnson, while the juniors constituted a majority of voters for write-in candidates not among the three listed on the poll. Among the freshmen, Governor Romney received nearly 36% of the vote, the highest percentage out of any one grade.
Students responding to the question “Are your political views basically the same as those of your parents?†answered in the affirmative within one point of 62% for the freshman, sophomore, and senior classes, while juniors logged a 73.5% similarity—over ten points higher than the rest of the school.
The club will use these data to draw meaningful conclusions about political culture, trends, and awareness among HHS students in the coming weeks.
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