By Gabriel Brogan

There is an election coming up, if you haven’t heard. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be facing off on November 5th in an election that, according to a PBS survey, 75% of the country believes will determine the fate of American Democracy itself. 

The Electoral System is the key to victory for any candidate attempting to win the presidency, a race in which each state has a certain number of electoral votes, based on population, that they must contribute to a single candidate. These electoral votes are counted up in the capitol. Whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes wins. 

It seems simple, right? It’s not. The electoral college turns the presidential race into a scramble for key “swing states,” states in which the population is divided relatively evenly along partisan lines and could go either way. Candidates hold rallies and make appearances in these states frequently, while states that have historically always gone for one party or another (like Massachusetts for the Democrats or Montana for the Republicans) get little to no attention from either candidate. 

Pennsylvania is a swing state. With a whopping 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania could decide what will certainly be a close election. According to the Commonwealth of PA election record, In 2016 Trump won PA by a narrow 0.72% margin. In 2020, the state went blue by a margin of 1.17%. Pennsylvania votes matter. 

And many McCaskey students can vote (click here for more info) in the upcoming election. Even the students who can’t vote have opinions. So what are the politics of the McCaskey student body?

In a survey of 151 McCaskey students in which we accepted responses from October 11th through the 22nd, we got a look at some of the favored candidates and key issues of our student body. 69.5% of surveyed students said they favored Harris to win the 2024 presidency. The other 30.5% was split up among third party candidates from Kanye to Jill Stein, 16.6% of students answered “I don’t care,” and only 6.3% clicked Trump.

It probably doesn’t take a survey to tell us that McCaskey campus, an urban school in a blue city, leans left. However, the campus was split on their most important issues. 21.2% of students said they care most about abortion, McCaskey’s most popular issue. Runner ups included the climate crisis at 18.5%, and the economy and inflation at 15.2%, which will likely be the deciding issue for the country as a whole according to a Gallup poll. The other issues with significant board presences were gun rights/gun control at 16%, drugs/crime at 6.6%, international cooperation at 4.6%, and migration at 3.3%. 

Many students didn’t select abortion as their #1 issue, but shared their opinions at the end of the survey. Their stances were all over the feminist spectrum, from “Everyone should have access to Plan B” to “Republicans will protect zygotes but forsake the lives of those carrying the parasite.” 

The rest of the survey-takers were split on myriad issues, foremost among them the current conflict in the Middle East. One student felt that the upcoming election is a choice between the “Better of two evils,” claiming that “Either way, we are funneling money into Israel and ignoring the damage caused by hurricanes.” Another student passionate about the Israeli conflict simply wrote in “Stop the Genocide!”.

While students are concerned about several topics this upcoming election (several survey takers complained that they couldn’t choose more than one issue) they are overwhelmingly critical of the democratic system. 97.4% of students surveyed were critical of American democracy, and 34% said our system is “Deeply flawed and needs a complete overhaul.” Students had many reasons for their distrust, one writing that the “Electoral College is flawed and must be removed.” Another said “I would love to abolish the two-party system.”

In conjunction with their criticism of the American democratic process, a majority of students believe they dont have much stake in the outcome of the November election. 41.1% said they favored a candidate to win, but didn’t think the outcome would change much. 11.9% of students wrote that they didn’t care at all. Though this apathy may seem disheartening, 47% of students said they were “really stressed” about the election and believed its results would meaningfully change their lives.  

McCaskey students may not feel strongly about the election or trust the system, but they trust each other—at least more than the rest of the country. American politics seem characterized by a great, sometimes unbridgeable divide between Democrats and Republicans. McCaskey students, however, aren’t so polarized. The final survey question asked students how they viewed the opposing party. While a 2019 Pew survey showed a sharp uptrend in negative feelings towards the opposite party among the American public (55% of Republicans viewed Democrats as immoral, 38% of Democrats viewed Republicans as unintelligent, etc.), a full 35.1% of surveyed students said that “We are all Americans and should get along.” 25% of students responded that they are “just confused,” meaning a majority of the campus has no hard feelings toward the opposing party. A few students captured this sentiment saying that “There is no reason that we cannot love one another despite our political beliefs,” and “Hatred is the enemy, not each other!!!”

On the opposite side of the coin, 36.5% of students did respond that the opposing party was “Deeply misguided,” but only 5 students answered that they are “scum that will destroy America.” While we may hate the system, very few of us hate each other—and America has not yet been destroyed. We’ll just have to hope we can keep that trend going through this November and beyond.