Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman won a primary Tuesday—just not the one that mattered.

Only 17 percent of New Hampshire primary voters may have supported Huntsman, but a majority of Moorestown Friends School voters selected the former Utah governor (played by junior Joe Kiernan) as their guy during the school’s mock primary election.

The vote capped off a day of activities tied to the political process, from debates to town hall meetings, and visits from local political figures U.S. Rep Jon Runyan and Moorestown Mayor John Button.

History teacher Judy vanTijn called the event “a civics lesson.”

“The idea is for students to understand the power of the vote, and how campaigns run, and why it is that one of the cardinal parts of the definition of democracy is free, fair, open elections and an informed electorate,” she said.

Many of the students are already relatively well-informed about politics and have been following the primaries, vanTijn said, though maybe not in the most conventional way.

“They get a lot of it from (Stephen) Colbert and Jon Stewart, which is just fine,” she said. “And a surprising number of them have feeds on their Facebook pages … The ones who are really into it read some of the news magazines.”

Most of the students who actively participated in the mock primary—playing candidates, giving presentations on ballot issues ranging from a 1 percent tax on sugar-sweetened drinks to additional funding for nuclear power—did so voluntarily as part of an elective, “which is one of the reasons why it works so well,” said vanTijn. "They're just doing it cause they want to."

Students representing five of the six candidates left in the Republican primary campaigned throughout the Upper and Middle schools—their images and slogans plastered all over the walls—and engaged in a Q&A moderated by radio host Michael Smerconish.

Standing unassumingly by his campaign table, senior Kyle Whittall half-joked when one of his “aides” asked him why he wasn’t being interviewed: “I’m Ron Paul. Nobody pays any attention to me.”

Whittall, 17, said he’s a Paul supporter and rattled off his reasons for supporting the Libertarian Texan (exhibiting a surprising depth of knowledge for a teenager): his opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, his desire to bring American troops home, and the fact that he wants to audit the Federal Reserve.

“He’s one of the few candidates that has a consistent record,” said Whittall. “I’m surprised the amount of support he’s been getting, given the lack of media attention.”

Eventual winner Joe Kiernan, 17, said he asked to play Huntsman because he’s a “big supporter.”

“I like that he’s a moderate, his vision, and his ability to work with both sides of our political spectrum,” said Kiernan, who believes Huntsman will start to gain ground in the wake of the New Hampshire primary, where he finished third.

Moorestown Friends began holding mock political conventions in 1960. In 2000, the school switched to mock primaries. Interestingly, the school’s winners almost never mesh with the national winners, with names like Arlen Specter, Bill Bradley and Dennis Kucinich appearing on a banner in the field house listing past winners.

“We’re always wrong. We’re so wrong,” said vanTijn.

Don’t let Joe Kiernan hear that.