American children are predicting who will win the election
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The students have spoken, and they want Hillary Clinton for president.
According to four major mock US elections, the Democratic nominee has secured the majority share of votes over Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Clinton's victory ranged from the dramatic to the nail-biting.
According to the Every Kid Votes election, Clinton earned nearly 70% of students' vote to Trump's 30%. In the OneVote election, meanwhile, she earned 47% while Trump fell just short at 41%.
In the other two elections, put on by Newsela and Scholastic, Clinton won 57% and 53% of the votes, respectively. A small remainder in both was split between Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.
Student elections have been a surprisingly accurate bellwether for the national elections. Ever since Scholastic began issuing its election in 1940, for example, students have elected the "wrong" candidate only twice: once in 1948 and again in 1960.
In Newsela's election, data revealed kids seem to vote mostly in line with actual demographic predictions. In schools with more than 70% black or Hispanic students, Clinton won more than 75% of votes. In schools with more than 70% white students, she won about 33%; the majority went to Trump instead.
Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesSurprises came mainly in which states Trump and Clinton managed to win.
In three of the four elections, Clinton snagged Georgia and South Carolina, even though most polls predict Trump has those states locked up. And despite FiveThirtyEight's models showing a 6% probability of Trump winning Minnesota, he still won the state among students half the time.
Among swing states, Trump won Ohio in three out of the four contests, Pennsylvania in one, and North Carolina and Florida in none.
The results come from hundreds of thousands of votes cast over roughly two-week period leading up to November 4. The smallest election, Scholastic's, included 153,000 students. The largest, put on by Every Kid Votes, had more than 740,000.