Vice President Kamala Harris was “elected” into office last week in a mock presidential election organized by Mercer’s Student Government Association, the Mercer Votes organization and the university’s political science department.

The election, which lasted about two days, ended with 66.9% of the vote going to Harris and former President Donald Trump receiving 29.6% of the electorate. The total number of votes cast was 429, or around 13% of the student body.

The results come at a time in the race as the two candidates are making their final campaign speeches and news conferences in swing states that will likely decide the election. Just last Monday, Trump gave a speech on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta, and former first lady Michelle Obama spoke on Harris' behalf in Atlanta on Tuesday.

More than a third of those who voted for Harris, who is running in her second presidential run and the Democratic Party's first nominee, said they believed she was the “most qualified candidate” in the race. 59 percent of all voters cited the qualifications of their preferred candidate and distrust of the other candidate as the main attractiveness factors.

Benjamin Hoyt, an assistant professor of political science, said that over the past two decades there has been “a sharp rise in what we call negative partisanship and affective polarization” in the country.

By negative partisanship, Hoyt means the idea that a voter casts their vote not because they want to see their candidate in office, but because they are afraid of seeing their candidate's opposition in office instead. Furthermore, he said, affective polarization suggests that while voters agree on policies, they do not believe “that people belonging to the other political party are trustworthy and honest.”

A similar share of Trump voters cited his economic plan as the main reason for his victory.

Of voters who said they would vote for Harris, 10% said they would not vote on Nov. 5. Of these 29 voters, 18 cited “other” as their reason for not voting. Almost 20% of these 29 voters said they were not eligible to vote in the federal election.

According to Dean of Students Doug Pearson, this data may have been distorted by the wording of the question, which asked whether students would vote on Nov. 5, rather than whether they would vote at all.

Trump had a somewhat tighter grip on his voters, but only by a hair's breadth. Seven percent of voters who said they would support the former president said they would not vote for him on Nov. 5, with most of them citing “other” as the reason for their abstention. Three said they were not registered to vote, a deadline that expired on Oct. 7 this year.

Overall, this proportion of voters who said they wanted to vote on November 5th is well above the national average for young voters.

“In 2020 and 2022, young people have returned to school at truly unprecedented levels. It's really one of the stories of 2020 and 2022 that young people's turnout changed the balance of this election,” Hoyt said. “There is evidence that people who have reached political maturity now, or who have reached voting age, or who reached voting age under President Trump's administration, have much higher levels of political literacy than previous generations of voters.”

Among Harris's voters, the most common political ideology, indicated by a number from 1 to 10, with one being strongly conservative and 10 being strongly liberal, was a seven. That was about 23% of their share of voters. For Trump's supporters, the most widespread political ideology numerically was a four, which made up about 26% of his voters.

The vast majority — nearly 60% — of students who participated in the mock election are students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Among those students, Harris won 74% of the vote versus 23% for Trump. CLAS is the largest school on campus, which explains why it had the largest voter representation.

The Stetson-Hatcher School of Business was the only school on campus to vote for Trump. More than 58% of School of Business students said they would vote for Trump. For months, polls have suggested that the economy is a top concern for voters, although there are mixed opinions about whose proposed economic agenda would be most damaging or helpful to the country.

While the Tift College of Education only had 12 representatives in the mock election, the college itself has a smaller class size than the larger CLAS or the School of Business. Classrooms have come under scrutiny in recent years as book bans in K-12 schools have become more common and education standards have come under scrutiny from conservative governors, members of Congress and parents.

Margaret Rooyakers, associate director of service and civic engagement at Mercer, said that while studying in the College of Health Professions, she and her classmates weighed candidates' policy proposals to determine which policies would be most helpful to their areas of expertise.

The two gender-segregated candidates were evenly split by the male electorate, which accounted for 40% of the votes cast. But among female voters, Harris received nearly 80% of the vote, while Trump received just 17%. The ratio of female to male voters largely reflected the population of Mercer's campus, where about 57% of students are female.