After a long and tiring election season, the victor was officially announced by the major television networks at around 8:15 p.m. PST on election night. President Obama cruised to reelection, beating former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and winning all but two of the states that he carried in 2008.
“I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe,” President Obama said in his victory speech in Chicago Tuesday night. “We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.”
“I was supporting President Obama,” senior Sukhaman Kaur said. “I think he will follow through in the plans he has for the country.”
For MTHS students, however, many weren’t sure who they were supporting in the lower profile state races.
“I wasn’t really following the race for governor,” freshman Liya Ewing said.
In the gubernatorial race, Democrat Jay Inslee was leading Republican Rob McKenna yesterday by about 30,000 votes. U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell easily won reelection with 59 percent of the vote over her Republican challenger.
On election night, Referendum 74, which would legalize same-sex marriage, looked likely to pass. Washington was officially named the first state to legalize recreational use of marijuana with Initiative 502. Initiative 1240, which would allow up to 40 publicly funded charter schools in Washington, was barely passing and Initiative 1185, which would require a two-thirds vote of the legislature to pass a tax increase, was passing handily.
“I was a little surprised by the marijuana law,” Ewing said. “I wouldn’t think that people would want to legalize marijuana because it’s illegal in federal law.”
The majority of the mock election results at MTHS follow the actual results on Nov. 6. The only measure whose result differed from the mock election result was the charter school initiative, which as of Wednesday evening, was barely passing.
