Moorestown Friends Students Pick Democratic Presidential Nominee

MOORESTOWN, NJ — It’s an election year, and students at Moorestown Friends School will get an education on the voting process. Moorestown Friends School will host its 16th Mock Primary Election on Tuesday, Jan. 14, the school announced.

Students from the school will portray candidates in this year’s Democratic Primary on the same day those candidates will debate for the final time before the Iowa Caucuses on national television. Those students in the image attached to this post are listed below, with the presidential candidate they will be representing are:

Front (left to right): Kobe Koren ’20 (Julian Castro), Kayla Patel ’21 (Kamala Harris), Bailey Butterworth ’20 (Andrew Yang), and Bobby Lodge ’21 (Pete Buttigieg).

Middle: MPE Coordinator and History Dept. Chair Clark Thomson, Shelby Deibler ’20 (Elizabeth Warren), Sammy Bastien ’20 (Amy Klobuchar), and Aani Desai ’22 (Tulsi Gabbard).
Back: Om Patil ’21 (Tom Steyer), Calvin Bell ’20 (Cory Booker), Aaron Clark ’20 (Joe Biden), and Aaron Klein ’20 (Bernie Sanders).

The all-day event will include the traditional entrance parade, political speeches from the candidates, final campaigning efforts, and educational workshops. Workshops will cover topics and feature activities surrounding politics or governance covering a wide spectrum, including political humor, the Electoral College, the impact of public speaking, social activism, international relations, and much more.

The keynote speaker will be journalist Ray Suarez, co-host of WorldAffairs, a nationally syndicated radio broadcast that airs on KQED public radio out of San Francisco and uploaded to rebroadcast by National Public Radio (NPR) stations around the country.

He will talk about the “Changing Demographics of American Voters.” Suarez recently completed an appointment as the John J. McCloy Visiting Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. He was also the host of Inside Story, a daily news program on Al Jazeera America, until that network ceased operation in 2016.

Suarez joined the PBS NewsHour in 1999 and was a senior correspondent for the evening news program on the PBS television network until 2013. He hosted the National Public Radio program Talk of the Nation from 1993-1999. In his more than 30-year career in the news business, he has also worked as a radio reporter in London and Rome, as a Los Angeles correspondent for CNN, and as a reporter for the NBC-owned station WMAQ-TV in Chicago.

Suarez ("Politics, The Media, and the First Amendment") will also participate in a mid-day workshop. Celebrity chef Gail Arnold ("Cooking with the Executive [Chef])" will also participate in the mid-day workshop. Arnold, a 1979 graduate of Moorestown Friends, has worked as an executive chef and private chef for Steven Spielberg, has cooked for Michelle Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Stoppard, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Hanks and countless other celebrities and dignitaries. She will describe her experiences as an executive chef and as a private chef and will also discuss her experience as a female moving up the corporate ladder.

Other activities will include a quilt display and presentation, brief speeches by each candidate, a Civics display about the Iowa State Fair, voting and the announcement of the election results.

The mock primary evolved from the school's 60-year quadrennial tradition. From 1960 to 1996, Moorestown Friends School held Mock Political Conventions, during which students acted as the campaign managers and delivered impassioned speeches to rally support for their nominee.

Developed chiefly by Social Studies Teacher G. MacCulloch “Cully” Miller, the Mock Political Convention simulated a national political practice and typically featured the party that was out of power at the time. In 2000, the quadrennial tradition transitioned to what is today’s Mock Primary Election.

The Mock Primary isn't an exact science. It has only correctly picked the eventual nominee three times. In 1988, Michael Dukakis was selected at the Moorestown Friends School Mock Political Convention, but lost in the general election to Ronald Reagan.

For the first time ever, in 2008, the votes of the Moorestown Friends School constituency finally mirrored the actual election, as John McCain won the Republican primary and Barack Obama was chosen as the Democratic nominee.

In 2016, Moorestown Friends School voters selected successful candidate and current U.S. President Donald Trump on the Republican ballot.