Tuesday 8 November 2016

The country is split: Post-election traumatic reactions

 

Whilst the US election is still being decided, I have jumped the gun over all other commentators, and got my wise post-election explanations in first.

After every election commentators aver that “the country is split” and then explain how a massive fault line runs between the winners and the losers. This is interesting, but it is not clear how any election could be conducted without the country being split, because even a large majority vote would reveal that the smaller number of losers were split off from the winning majority. It is precisely because people are not all of one mind that elections are held, in order to find out which view is supported by the majority.

The next delusion, particularly when one party’s vote is very similar to the other party, is that the voters all collaborated in not giving either party a majority. That is to say, that there was a version of the Parliamentary pairing procedure whereby one Member of Parliament agrees with another Member from the opposite party that both will not attend a debate and will not vote, and will instead go to attend to other matters, commonly a mistress. (If it turns out to be the same mistress, I presume the arrangement breaks down somewhat).

In the case of a finely balanced election result, this type of pairing arrangement, commentators pronounce, has percolated through to the general public, who have decided that neither party deserves unfettered access to power. Perhaps. However, how does an equal vote by telepathic balancing compare to the simpler case of two sides virulently disagreeing with each other, but being unable to muster enough votes to crush the other side? Sometime the country is split, and has very different views as to which policies are required. The parsimonious explanation is that neither side was able to gain advantage, despite their best efforts. Balancing with the other dreadful lot was the last thing on anyone’s mind.

So, the results of the election always have the same underlying features: voters chose which party to support for their own idiosyncratic ends, and the commentators explain their supposed deep reasons after the event. That does not mean that I turn my eyes away from those sub-group analyses beloved of political specialists. What will I be interested in seeing after the US election?

Most of all I wonder how years of education, which supposedly indicates an ability to evaluate arguments, will correlate with actual votes, and thereby to test the popular supposition that the better educated voters will shun the Republican candidate. I assume that sex and age will have a minor influence, but the latter might show bigger differences, with older voters more cynical and more likely to vote Republican. Race should not matter at all, because if America is a melting pot then policies not polities should prevail. It races vote en bloc (say more than 65% in one direction) then the woe betide the republic, which will become disunited genetic states.

Yes, I know that years married will probably be the best predictor, as Steve Sailer has shown, with the longest married being the most Republican, the one night stands most Democrat, but I was saving that for last.

Does the US have a mechanism for doing the whole thing again and again, a Hanging Chad constitutional loophole which iterates a bootstrapping procedure to overcome the poverty of historicism?

Just asking.

7 comments:

  1. Age does matter in the US. When people are young they often vote Dem; when they are older GOP; and when they are dead they vote Dem again.

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  2. Trump will win rather easily, as the closeness of the race is due primarily to media gaslighting, with ridiculously gerrymandered polls, and ridiculously obvious agenda-dricen( not "biased") coverage.

    Race dxs will be stark, as they always are, but Trump wil, receive a relatively large percent of the black vote, eg, about 15%, which would be the largest
    percentage received by the Repub,ican candidate since 1960.

    Trump is crushing it among white males...females typically go for the Democrat, but Trump is doing relatively well among white women --he may even break even.
    trump is doing very well among "Hispanics".

    Trump has run a masterful campaign, truly stunning.Essentially an Independent, he took on the Republican Establishment and their handpicked nominee, Jeb Bush,and destroyed him --13 other contenders fell before the relentless scythe of Trump.

    He commandeered the Party, won the nomination and will now crush the entrenched corrupt Democrat nominee
    He has also exposed and destroyed the MSM in the process, agenda-driven left wing acolytes cowardly advancing their agenda under the cover of " objectivity " .

    Trump's achievements are simply stunning....with his very high IQ and myriad of positive personality traits, the next 8 years may see successes heretofore undreamed of in America, at least since Ronnie.

    The " college-educated" variable seems to be a complex one-- i n.looking at the innards of one of these media polls, I noted that people with college degrees did tend to favor the crooked old hag more than .trump., by a 20% margin or so...

    ..BUT, NOT SO FAST...when you checked popularity by income, Trump was more popular by 20% or so among the middle class and the well to do!....

    thus the college degreed said to favor the Dem includes that perennial array of losers who major in the humanities and the sociali sciences, Women's studies, Journalism and what not...who ostensibly have obtained degrees, but are essentially unemployable or who thus flounder in relatively low paying jobs that their meager education has enabled them to commandeer.

    It's 10.48 am her in the States, and I think the victory for Trump announced tonight will be a rejection of the elites of both parties--the UniParty as known stateside, and a bitch-slap to the leftist media.

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  3. The US is split in the sense of increasingly polarised, i.e. there is a decline in swing voting. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/03/the-astonishing-decline-of-the-american-swing-voter/

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  4. It is also meaningful to say that the closer the vote is to 50-50 the more the county is split. "Split" is the opposite of "landslide".

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    Replies
    1. uneducated low-intelligence guy27 November 2016 at 10:32

      No. What is "meaningful" to say is that where democracy is healthy results near a 50-50.

      "Landslide", as it's trendy to call it, is the opposite of democracy.

      Of course, it wouldn't surprise me that somebody linking to the Washington Post when they don't link to the Guardian held democracy in disdain.
      It's the opposite that would be strange in facts.
      There has been a powerful anti-democracy propaganda of late, and like all forms of propaganda it will first show its effects in "the intelligent" -- who have begun to call themselves intelligent, once they were made to feel their support of the dawning globalist authoritarianism allows them to.

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  5. It was not close. The NYT and Google had great sites to follow the election. The NYT site this morning shows succinct map summaries: http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president.

    In short: Trump flipped at least 5 states. Hillary didn't flip one. There are 4 states yet to report; he doesn't need them. The "change from 2012" map is interesting.

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