Presidential election survey shows student distaste for candidates

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Students overwhelmingly chose to not select any of the presidential candidates or were unsure of their decision for the 2016 election, according to a survey taken by the Hawk Highlights.

“Other answers,” amounting to a total 47.36%, won by a landslide compared to Democrat party candidate Hillary Clinton’s 35.08% in the student survey. The “other answers” was a mixture of “I don’t know,” those who decided not to vote for either candidate, and three votes for Democrat challenger Bernie Sanders. There were also two students that didn’t know who the candidates were.

Trump followed behind Hillary with 15.78%, followed by Johnson with 1.75%. There was a percentage of 10.52% who chose to not answer the question. Asked about their support for a specific candidate, 32.45% of the people would vote for one candidate because they did not like the other candidate.

The people who were surveyed responded to the question, “If you could vote, which presidential candidate would you vote for?” Surprisingly, nearly half of those who were surveyed chose to vote for neither candidate.

One of these respondents stated, “I would rather move to Italy…” when asked why they would not vote. Compared to the 2012 election where 26% told the Hawk Highlights that they did not know there was an election going on, there was only one student who was unaware of the upcoming election.

In order to do the survey, three students from the journalism class talked confidentially to 114 Galena high school students between Oct. 28 and Nov. 2 at both the GILA and SHS campuses. Students were selected at random from a list provided by the school district.

This story has the assistance of Brenden Fuson, Hawk Highlights editor, who collected survey results.