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HEY! This has MILD Squid Game season 3 spoilers lmao
I’m sure that for most of America’s existence, schoolteachers have tried to interest kids in the process of presidential elections as they happened. The momentous and ultimately contentious election of 2000 was no exception. Scion of the Bush dynasty, George W. Bush faced Bill Clinton’s milquetoast Vice President, Al Gore.
This seemed somewhat important, just like the last few elections had. In most school districts in the 1990s, you could usually expect these little Welcome to Election Season! exercises. Students might make posters about past presidents, or put on skits about the process. The year 2000 was different, though, and deserves to be printed here just because of how bizarre it was.
Word got out that the teachers had plans for a mock election. We assumed this would be a small little thing, and a couple boys said they wanted to run. Immediately, the teachers started to probe them, though… “which one of you wants to be Bush, and which one of you wants to be Gore?”
Apparently the two of them had to pick. Within a day or so, the rest of us were sorted roughly into four equal groups. Given that it was Y2K, this made everyone think of Harry Potter immediately. Things got weird quickly…
Two of the groups would represent the campaigns of George Bush and Al Gore respectively. The other two would represent the media, and statisticians taking the polls.
It didn’t matter what our actual political alignment was; we would roleplay as Bush or Gore’s campaign staff. We’d get graded on it. There were an equal number of students in each of the political campaign classes, and teachers made it clear that it had to stay that way.
Learning to argue from "the other side of the aisle" was important either way, right? Voting by the rest of the school would determine the results of the election.
If I remember right, the sorting was (roughly, and obviously) based on which homeroom you were in, but meant to keep the numbers balanced. We couldn’t just go to another group. We were told we could switch with someone instead. If you’ve seen a certain sequence in Squid Game, you now know why it inspired this article ultimately.
Our grade was going to play out the national election for the rest of the school, like a pageant. The two campaigns would try to sway the rest of the middle schoolers in other grades.
Those two kids picked (randomly?) would represent George W. Bush and Al Gore. The chemistry classroom would host the Al Gore group; the music teacher handled George W. Bush’s team for some reason. We’d get social studies grades based on all this. The pollsters, led (obviously) by the math teacher would keep everyone updated on who was in the lead over the next weeks. The media, controlled by the language arts teacher, would report on it all.
A school election makes sense (prom king? student council?), but this? Heck, a mock election even made sense, but… whoa, they were really going to bring real world politics into it? Bold move, public school!
The two kids playing Bush and Gore attended a couple (really pompous and funny, actually) debates, appeared in mock commercials made by the language arts class Within weeks, a “banned topics” list got passed around from the language arts teacher. These included abortion and a couple other things? Stuff we weren’t supposed to bring into the roleplay debates, etc. These topics made students too emotional and were off-limits.
Gun control quickly became the topic they were arguing about. A school shooting in Littleton, Colorado back in April made it a huge issue that November. Locally, guns were perennially popular, and people just owned them. The Gore and Bush kid both gave elaborate speeches about gun control. Both their commercials had a glue gun standing in for the real thing.
Kids joked about being other politicians besides Bush and Gore. That got shut down quickly. The specter of Bill Clinton loomed heavy over the whole mess. He wasn’t an official character, after all, but people were still thinking about his dramatic impeachment, Monica Lewinsky, and more. Those, too, were “banned topics,” pretty much.
It was all kind of counterintuitive. When it came down to it? Neither of our mock candidates had any choice about what they would say, really. Their political position had been decided within a few minutes of the teacher asking who they’d like to portray.
The vast majority of students at my rural school came from Republican families. The few Democrats there were quick to find their way into the “Al Gore” room. Then, though, they were amidst a lot of people who didn’t want to support Al Gore. And there were quite a few kids who just didn’t want to support anybody (ie baby-anarchists or whatever).
I switched with someone quickly, making my way into the pollsters group. The pie charts were sweet I must admit. And our school’s election ended a bit before the actual election! We weren’t affected by the weird disputes and miscounts in Florida that year.
Those would, of course, ultimately shift the balance of power nationwide towards George W. Bush. In the school, he had won quickly, and by a landslide.
I never heard of the school doing that again. Maybe, had the nationwide debacle not rained on everyone’s parade, it might’ve become a regular thing. Outside of it, the concepts would keep going, though. I know the whole idea had been teaching us to debate properly, and to handle ourselves in that kind of thing. This missed a lot of points about politics and the way it affects people, but that was typical of the era. Politics as a game of sorts became more and more of a perspective in the 2000s.
Why? I’m not sure. Perhaps it was a new, very online way of feeling dispassionate and dissociating? The election cycle in the 2000s was incredibly strange anyways. I think the school gently tried to distance us from the reality of political decisions (ie, banned topics, sorting, etc), while still teaching us the process. It was really tone-deaf but typical of the time period.
If someone tried this exercise today (or, really, any time after 2018) it would be a disaster with multiple legal groups involved, probably. It’s not just that society has become more polarized, either. It’s more that we’ve lost our tolerance for that kind of nonsense. A lot of the fruits of America’s political decisions are starting to come home to roost in huge ways. Treating it like a game or exercise isn’t as easy these days.
This page was last updated on February 10th, 2026.