Students predict: Harris will be the new US president
2024-11-01 Over 130 school classes from all over Germany have submitted their predictions for the upcoming US election and agree: Kamala Harris will be the new US president. The students had taken part in the ‘US Embassy Election Project’ and presented their predictions at an online event. The interdisciplinary teaching project was developed by Sina Werner and Professor Torben Schmidt from the Institute of English Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
The presentation of the results showed that the students see Harris as narrowly ahead in the evaluation of 48 states. There were no clear predictions for two of the 50 states (Michigan and Georgia). But even if they were to go to Donald Trump in the election, Harris would still be very narrowly ahead according to the students' predictions.
Mark Rozell, an expert in US politics at George Mason University Fairfax County, Virginia, commented on the results of the students' analysis, which were presented at the final event. He was initially surprised that they predicted a victory for Harris in some of the so-called swing states, but considers the forecast to be realistic.
Since the end of their summer holidays, the students had been dealing with the US election and the complex world of American politics in their English classes. Each participating school class was assigned a US state. They examined the political processes and opinion-forming in that state. They then processed further information about the history, politics, economy, demography, society and local and regional media landscape of the respective states to create a well-founded and creatively designed election forecast for ‘their’ state.
The ‘US Embassy School Election Project 2024’ is a substantive and methodological advancement of the project successfully carried out by the US Embassy in Berlin in cooperation with Leuphana and the Berlin educational organisation LIFE e.V. for the presidential elections in 2012, 2016 and 2020. In the past, this has not only produced extremely accurate election forecasts from the participating school classes, but also research papers.
Further information on the project results can be found here:
www.teachaboutus.org/mod/book/view.php