The only explanation for Nickelodeon's terrible election campaign is it thinks children are idiots

If you haven’t had a chance to experience Nickelodeon’s Kids Pick the President campaign for 2016, let me sum the whole experience up using their website’s Meme Maker.

Kids Pick the President is an annual campaign that’s been conducted by Nick since 1988 where they poll their younger viewers on who should win the election. This year the channel seems to be putting a particularly 2016 spin on it, which is a terrible idea because 2016 has been absolutely terrible, so far.

Let’s start with the video features. As part of the campaign, Nickelodeon put together videos introducing kids to the three candidates. Yes, you read that correctly: Gary Johnson is in this race. (Jill Stein was excluded).

Here’s the video biography Nickelodeon made of Donald Trump.

It’s pretty light on Trump’s biographical details, probably because many of Trump’s biographical details are rated-R for graphic sexual content. Then there’s his platform, which describes one the areas he’s focusing on as “immigration reform.”

I suppose promising to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico is a reform in the sense that it would forever reform the landscape of our country (not in a good way).

Clinton’s video is mostly remarkable for the kid who slides across the screen and says “Nice!” when the announcer points out she was previously the First Lady …

… and this horrifying anthropomorphized top hat.

The actual voting takes place on KidsPickThePresident.com, with the results to be announced next Saturday. The website includes more helpful information on the candidates, although some of the facts appear to be out of date.

(Uh, that Trump fact is not really true anymore.)

This is also where you can find the previously-mentioned Meme Maker. which lets you put one of 40 different text options over 50 different screenshots.

Kids Pick the President 2016 wouldn’t be so disappointing if the network hadn’t done an okay job of this in previous years. Prior to this race, the campaign was a part of the Peabody Award-winning Nick News with Linda Ellerbee, which actually succeeded in getting a handful of serious questions in front of the presidential candidates. Here’s John McCain and Barack Obama respectively answering a young girl’s questions on college affordability.

But Linda Ellerbee retired in 2015 after more than 20 years. Nick News is out, vague memes are in.