U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders scored this week at the Minnesota State Capitol, with 51 percent of voters favoring him in a mock presidential primary election. The electorate, however, was a tad skewed. Some voters were at the cusp of 18, while others as young as 11. More than half were students of color.
For five years, Amy Anderson has organized primary and Election Day voting for K-12 students from across Minnesota, with mock ballots virtually identical to those their parents would find in the voting booth.
On Tuesday, Anderson — the senior program director for the Greater Twin Cities YMCA’s Center for Youth Voice — brought 300 students from grades 6 through 12 to the capitol to meet with state lawmakers, Secretary of State Steve Simon, State Attorney General Keith Ellison and State Auditor Julie Blaha.
The students also voted — delivering Sanders, a Democratic candidate for president, a win. The students, who came to St. Paul from as far away as Big Lake and Prior Lake, were fairly sympathetic to President Donald Trump, who garnered 25 percent of the vote.
Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and “longshot candidate” who officially ended his candidacy in early February, won 12 percent of the mock primary vote. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., came in behind him, at 11 percent. Other candidates barely registered.
“The core of this is learning civics by doing civics,” said Anderson, the former director of Minnesota Civic Youth and the Minnesota branch of Kids Voting, a national nonpartisan youth voting network. “Minnesota is really proud of voter turnout, but that does not happen automatically. … Starting young, with young people, to show this is important to our values is really important to me, to the Secretary of State’s office and to the Y.”.
How predictive is a kid vote? Anderson pointed to Ellison’s election to attorney general in 2018 as anecdotal evidence that young people have been leaning a bit more toward progressive Democrats than their parents. Ellison won both the student vote and the general election, but students favored him more strongly than actual voters.
“When you’re talking about younger kids, you would think they would be parroting what they heard at home, and that was not happening,” Anderson added. “(Ellison) was getting a lot of negative press around his marital situation … but he was also getting a lot of press as an African-American man running for office. How much were kids influenced by someone who looks like them?”
HER CAMPAIGN: 300,000 KID VOTES ON NOV. 3
The YMCA recruited students to Tuesday’s mock election a variety of ways — through teachers, civics classes, student government groups, and at YMCAs themselves — with some schools bringing as many as 50 young people and turning away just as many for space, said Joan Schimml, a YMCA spokesperson.
While the YMCA did not track the race of participants, Schimml said students of color were over-represented Tuesday compared to actual voting patterns, with as many as 60 or 70 percent of the mock voters coming from different ethnic groups.
For Anderson, the mock primary was a bit of a trial run. Through the YMCA, she has teamed with the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office to get mock ballots into 500 schools across the state, with the goal of having 300,000 K-12 students vote on Election Day next November. That’s more than double the 115,000 students who participated in Kids Voting MN balloting in 2016.
In the past, Simon’s office conducted “Students Vote” mock balloting at high schools about 10 days before the general election. This is the first year his office will be hosting mock voting on Election Day itself, and at all grade levels.
Anderson said her ballots will closely resemble those of each community, right down to the city council options, if desired, though they can be customized by each school.
The YMCA is also recruiting young people to be paid election judges in the general election. Students must be at least 16 years old to qualify, and schools will excuse the absence.