Name: A Mathematician's Perspective on the Divide
Uploaded: 2016-11-25T19:25:57.000Z
Duration: 15 min 38 s
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On election night 2016 I had flashbacks to the 2000 election, staying awake late into

the evening glued to the television hoping that Florida would come through for, well,

Adverbs of degree

in 2000 I was a kid and a total Democrat just like my parents.

And I remember how deeply unfair it felt when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the

Two things about that election stuck with me, that ended up transforming how I think

Even back then I had a good enough intuition for statistics to know that if presidential

elections consistently come up so close, within a few percentage points almost every time,

The second strange thing was this whole idea of red states, blue states, and swing states.

A lot of people focus on the swing states but what I found much more mathematically

compelling is that there are red states and blue states.

Why are there states that don’t change their mind?

The feelings from that election night followed me through the aftermath of 9/11 and the wars

I didn’t want and all the way to the polls once I was 18, but in the mean time it was

taken as a given in my entire liberal bubble that obviously Bush is stupid and Republicans

are stupid and I went along with this way of thinking until those old questions started

Why aren’t the Democrats, who are so obviously correct, winning by a huge margin?

The standard answer in my circles seemed to be that, well, if Bush is stupid and Republicans

vote for him it’s because they’re stupid, and if Republicans are stupid and half the

country is Republican, then it must be that half the country is stupid, look at us the

smartest teenagers ever, struggling to make our way through the land of the stupid.

The aura of logical language lends the voice of authority but it doesn’t make something

I learned that red states are red because they have more rural areas, and blue states

are blue because they have bigger cities.

I learned that whether you’re Democrat or Republican can be pretty accurately predicted

by where you’re born, and no one chooses where to be born.

I had to consider that if I were born in a different place with a different family I

would be an uncompromising Republican who makes fun of stupid liberals and believes

all the anti-liberal stereotypes, and I realized there’s also plenty of awful people who

are Democrats just because of their circumstances.

I learned why elections are so close, that if one side leads by a lot, they can put fewer

resources into campaigning, while the losing party shifts their platform to appeal to more

voters, meaning that Democrats and Republicans are not two fundamentally different types

of people with fundamentally different ideologies, but moving targets in a self-balancing system.

I had to entertain the premise that maybe Republicans and Democrats are equally intelligent

people doing the best they can with what they know, and as I got older and my world grew,

I’ve met many very smart and wonderful Republicans who have led me to believe that, as usual,

The divide that made my teenage self mock Republicans for their big gas-guzzling trucks

while I enjoyed the invisible urban infrastructure that paved my roads, picked up my garbage,

and delivered the gas I used to heat my home through hidden pipes.

I want to heal the divide that makes some liberals not just mock but actually fear people

who find personal and cultural value in gun ownership, the divide that makes us forget

how easy it is to demand we all get rid of something that only other people value.

I want to heal the divide that leads many nonreligious city dwellers to fundamentally

misunderstand the social infrastructure roles of the church in rural communities, caring

for the sick and the poor in places far from the offices of government-funded social programs.

The shared infrastructure of cities makes it easier, more efficient, to improve quality

of life with less money, to adapt to changes in the world, to recover economically.

That’s the usual divide, but with Trump I think there’s a different story, and it’s

You see, a lot of people were surprised by Trump’s victory, and this surprise has led

to a lot of speculation regarding the polls and where they went wrong.

Which they weren’t really that wrong because Hillary won the popular vote by a large margin

so it’s not like there’s some mysterious chunk of Trump supporters we didn’t know

The difference between the polls and the outcome led to this obsession with pointing at different

bits of the polls to try and explain why Trump won.

It’s the standard fallacy of focusing on what’s measurable because that’s what

It’s evidence, it’s proof, and anyone with basic math skills can compare numbers

in the completely logical agreed-upon form, and let’s combine that with my other favorite

intellectual mistake: the one where you get what you measure.

If you measure race, you get race, if you measure gender and sexuality, you get gender

Media has been taken over with arguing about these things because it’s easy to pseudo-rationally

argue about what number is bigger than what other number.

The media is centering the conversation around identity politics because that’s what the

data _is_, but it’s not what the data _shows_.

Like, Trump didn’t win because of lower black turnout, though voter suppression worked

Trump won and also we measured black voter turnout.

Lots of data, in larger contexts, and weeks later I’ve finally come to a conclusion.

It’s not really about liberal vs conservative, city vs country, white vs multicultural, not

Not vs, and not necessarily as individuals but also as communities and as a culture,

Edison Research, which does the US election exit polls, shows that over-45s voted Trump

while under-45s voted Hillary, and other polls show other breakdowns, over-50s voting for

Trump, the trend of all the polls is that the older you get the more you’re a Trump

voter, while Hillary was strongly favored among younger voters.

And voter turnout in those age groups looks pretty normal, though if younger voters turned

out like older voters did Hillary would’ve won in a landslide, meanwhile Baby Boomers

are getting older, lifespans increase, and the older you are the more you turn out to

vote so this was a good election for appealing to older voters, and older didn’t used to

be a Republican thing but Obama’s appeal to young voters set the stage to take the

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