By Deb Twyman

As a high school government teacher and Department Chair, I’ve run more than my fair share of school wide elections in presidential election years. One thing was always consistent – however the kids voted, they appeared to be following their parents example. Granted, the percentages were not always the same, but the winner of the student election inevitably mirrored the actual election results.

I’m getting old and I wanted to make certain that my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me so I went back and looked it up. The gold standard for student elections has always been the venerable Scholastic Student Mock Election. Scholastic’s first election was held back in 1940, and since then student voters have only picked a different candidate from the one who won the general election twice: in 1948 and 1960. As polling goes, this is a pretty darned good track record.

That’s why these most recent results bode well for Clinton. In Scholastic’s student election, which included 153,000 students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Clinton won that vote, coming in with 52% of the vote to Trump’s 35%.

The EveryKidVotes! mock election, which includes more than 700,000 students across the US and runs through November 4th is showing, as of this writing, Hillary winning with 68% of the votes and Trump at 31%.

The latest results released today from Newsela also showed similar results. In this case, more than 380,000 students in grades 2 through 12 voted overwhelmingly to elect Hillary Clinton. When the votes were counted, Clinton took 57% to Donald Trump’s 32%. Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson split the remainder.

Kids, particularly little kids tend to vote the way their parents do, and if that holds true in this election it bodes well for Hillary.