The US News’s mock election last week showed a thin victory for Donald Trump among students, a clear victory for Rob Portman among students, and landslides for both Democrats in the faculty vote. All students had the opportunity to vote during their English class, and faculty were given ballots in their mail boxes, which 50 returned.submitted.
Trump won the student vote by a thin plurality, 43-40 against Clinton, with Libertarian Gary Johnson winning 12 percent, and the Green Party’s Jill Stein earning 5 percent of the vote. The results of the faculty vote were starkly different, showing a clear discontinuity in the views of faculty and students at US. Among faculty, Clinton won a massive 84 percent victory, where Trump won a total of just 3 out of the 50 fifty faculty votes we received, the same number that Johnson won, and just one more vote than the two votes that Stein won. Evidently, our faculty don’t feel the same way about this election that our students do.
While Trump’s win was very tight, he did win a plurality in every single class. Trump’s support never reached a majority, however, varying from 39 to 46 percent within each grade. Clinton’s support was consistently just below Trump’s, ranging from 38 to 43 percent.
The election also polled for the Ohio Senatorial race, which showed another divided community. Among students, Portman won a landslide victory, 74-26 percent. The nature of Portman’s massive victory, whereas Trump only narrowly won, may suggest that the conservative students who evidently form the largest portion of students at US, are following a similar trend to conservatives around the country, in that they are happy to support more mainstream Republicans like Portman, but may feel hesitant about Donald Trump. The faculty vote showed a clear victory for Strickland, the Democrat, in 71-29 percent vote, diverging from student opinion sharply. Again, Trump’s win of just 6% of the faculty vote compared to Portman’s win of almost a third of the faculty likely suggests that same trend, that more conservative or even moderate faculty members are comfortable voting for Portman, but do not support Trump.
Thus, our vote points to three conclusions of the views of our community.
First, the student body is quite evenly balanced with regards to the presidential election, with a 3 point Trump plurality, and overwhelmingly supportive of Portman with regards to the senatorial election.
Second, in both elections, the faculty are overwhelmingly voting for Democrats, but are noticeably more unified around Hillary Clinton for president than Ted Strickland for senate.
Third, Republican voters at US in general seem much more warm towards Rob Portman than Donald Trump. This may be no coincidence. Rob Portman has publicly stated he is not willing to vote for Donald Trump in the presidential election, along with numerous other high ranking Republicans in congress, suggesting that our community sympathizes more with the so called GOP establishment than with Donald Trump.
We are excited to see how our community’s views compare to the country’s on Tuesday. Until then, we remain a divided community.
