Since the Eisenhower administration, said schoolchildren have correctly predicted the outcome of all U.S. presidential elections. And in 2004, let's just hope the damned kids are wrong. Where most polls show that President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry are in a statistical dead heat, the 327,707 kids in all 50 states who were polled by the Weekly Reader indicate that our president for the next four years will be … uh, hmm … Bush. By a landslide.
According to the USA Today, the Weekly Reader poll reveals that school-age children support President Bush 65 percent to Kerry's paltry 35 percent. Voting was done in classrooms, on the Internet and on an 800 line by kids in first through 12th grade. While Gallup pollsters, according to the USA Today, have called the Weekly Reader and two similar polls—a Scholastic poll shows Bush with a 52 percent victory and Channel One, an in-school educational network, shows a Bush victory with 55 percent—”irrelevant” because they aren't truly random, there's something frightening about the Weekly Reader poll's 44-year streak, having batted 1,000 in the last 11 presidential elections.
As an aside, the voting results in New Mexico's Eddy County (Carlsbad area) have correctly mirrored the outcome of U.S. presidential elections since becoming a county in 1887.
