Written by: Madison Schettler ’17 and McKenna Trohalis ’17

In our last issue, we ran a poll that allowed Bethel High students to choose the presidential candidate they would vote for. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic senator from Vermont won that poll with 79% of the votes. Now that it is closer to Connecticut’s primary, and many seniors have registered to vote, we decided to run the same poll. Our Republican candidates poll included John Kasich, who won with 61% of 41 votes, followed by Donald Trump with 22% and Ted Cruz with 17%. And between Democratic candidates, Bernie Sanders won 94% of 47 votes, leaving Hillary Clinton with just 6%. When winners Kasich and Sanders were compared, Sanders won with 89% of 38 votes leaving 11% for Kasich. These results are completely contradictory to the results of the actual primaries. Although delegate results are not final until this July, Trump is the Republican frontrunner with 737 delegates, Cruz follows with 475 and Kasich falls behind with just 143. Republicans need to win 1,237 delegates in order to win the nomination. Clinton leads the Democratic party, with 1,243 delegates and 469 superdelegates, while Sanders trails with 980 delegates and 31 superdelegates. Democrats need 2,383 delegates to win their party’s nomination. Delegates are elected, state based representatives of a party whereas superdelegates are unelected delegates that are free to support whatever delegate they choose at the Democratic party’s national convention. The results of our poll are most likely different because of our extremely small number of voters and the demographics of those who did vote. We live in a blue state, which means that Connecticut voters vote for predominantly Democratic candidates, which explains the higher number of votes in the Democratic poll, and how Sanders won by such a large margin. Another reason that Sanders may have pulled ahead is his popularity with young voters. One of the strengths of his campaign is his appeal to voters ages 17-29, which certainly applies to BHS. For example, in Iowa he won the vote of this age demographic by 70% (The New York Times). Although BHS students have certainly spoken in favor of Sanders, we will have to wait until November to find out what America says!