[HN Gopher] The median voter is a 50-something white person who ...
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The median voter is a 50-something white person who didn't go to
college
Author : paulpauper
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-10-03 19:35 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.slowboring.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.slowboring.com)
| zw123456 wrote:
| My view on the problem with politics today is that people have
| started to view it as sport, not selecting competent people to
| represent you for law making. I call it Political Face Painting.
| Like the guy who paints his face the colors of his favorite team
| when s/he goes to the game. That's cool, if you want to paint
| your face to go to a ball game, drink beer and scream your head
| off, great, no problem. But it seems like that mentality has
| crept into politics where you now have people paint their face
| red or blue and view it as a competition between parties. That
| will not end well in my view.
| twofornone wrote:
| >My view on the problem with politics today is that people have
| started to view it as sport
|
| The average person is simply unable to evaluate competence,
| especially from news clips and "debates". The median voter is
| not a highly competitive white collar knowledge worker with a
| background in STEM necessary to evaluate complex topics with
| objectivity. Instead its the fry cook, the retail worker, the
| warehouse stocker, blue collar tradesman, liberal arts
| graduate, etc.
|
| What really happened was that the pool of politically active
| citizens expanded, and now because of the shape of the normal
| distribution we are dealing with a sort of political endless
| summer - which media in particular are all too eager to take
| advantage of for political power.
| bko wrote:
| > The median voter is not a highly competitive white collar
| knowledge worker with a background in STEM necessary to
| evaluate complex topics with objectivity
|
| I'm more scared about highly competitive knowledge people
| with STEM degrees making political decisions. They might be
| naive enough to think they can engineer society to fit their
| whims with no unintended consequences.
| desine wrote:
| The tradesmen likely know more about the logistical structure
| of a functioning society than most STEM employees, who too
| often live in ivory towers.
|
| The restaurant staff often know more about human nature and
| behavior than the Psychiatrist who's been trained to see all
| our flaws as chemical imbalances to be fixed.
|
| Comments like yours are increasing the divide in this
| country, and are deeply problematic.
| Retric wrote:
| It's really not about STEM vs cook. Voters are stuck
| compressing a huge range of choices into a single vote which
| creates horrific incentives for politicians. You can piss off
| huge swaths of the population as long as you can just squeeze
| through enough voters it doesn't matter. Toss in a little
| inequality in how much each vote counts and things get much
| much worse.
|
| Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your
| favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you dislike
| the most. It's not better but suddenly everyone wants to be
| an inoffensive centrist. Which just shows how much incentives
| influence the system.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| Matt Taibbi (and others) compare it to Pro Wrestling. Which is
| actually kind of a cool thing, and gets dumped on way too
| unfairly in general as an art form. But as a model for
| politics, oh god, please, no. The guy with the nuclear launch
| codes should not be the best entertainer.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| There is no "selection process." The only people eligible to
| participate in federal "democracy" are already rich, powerful,
| and well-connected. The voters then "choose," in primaries and
| elections, based mostly on who has the best marketing, which is
| again a function of wealth and power. Occasionally participants
| in this process will throw ordinary citizens a bone as part of
| the marketing, but even these gestures are largely emaciated
| and performative. There's not some solemn exercise of civic
| duty going on.
|
| 2,000 years ago people born into wealth and power fought
| amongst each other for leadership and control while the
| population simply learned to live with the results. The only
| thing that has changed since is that the process has been
| optimized: less bloodshed, less constant dramatic upheaval, the
| hills and valleys leveled a bit. This benefits everyone,
| including those on top. But let's not pretend we're engaged in
| some grand experiment for the betterment of mankind. We're
| living in a plutocracy. Always have, always will.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _2,000 years ago people born into wealth and power fought
| amongst each other for leadership and control while the
| population simply learned to live with the results._
|
| 2,000 years ago even the plebeians had the right to vote.
|
| > _We 're living in a plutocracy._
|
| Agreed.
| vsskanth wrote:
| This isn't useful. Control of Congress in the US isn't dictated
| by which wins the popular vote.
|
| I want to know who is the median voter group most likely to hand
| over control of the House, Senate and Presidency.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'd call that the "swing voter group".
| willis936 wrote:
| Of those, the one that is most decoupled from the popular vote
| is the Senate. For that the best thing to do is to weight the
| stats inversely proportional to the state population. I think
| you'll find that the median voter in that case is a very
| 50-something very white person who really didn't go to college.
| nickm12 wrote:
| Point notwithstanding, this article says that its own title is
| wrong: "Non-college whites over 50 are a minority of the
| electorate".
| Imnimo wrote:
| I don't understand why I would care about the median national
| voter. Shouldn't political parties focus on winning specific
| state-level races, both for congress and president? The national
| popular vote is meaningless.
| twa999 wrote:
| that's one of the reasons why this guy wants to import 700
| million new voters.
| [deleted]
| reillyse wrote:
| I feel like this article exposes a huge fallacy in how people
| think about politics in the US. Politics isn't a horse race. It's
| not about winning. It's about making the country a better place
| by enacting laws and making sure everything runs correctly.
|
| If you win the election but make the country a worse place,
| you've still lost.
| akomtu wrote:
| These days politics in the US is a ship without a captain
| visionary where two highly antagonistic teams of sailors fight
| for the right to steer the wheel, and when a sailor of one team
| gets to grab the wheel, he promptly appoints his cronies on all
| important posts, while the other team barricades the kitchen
| and sabotages whatever the first team tries to do. As you might
| expect, the ship's trajectory is rather unpredictable and it's
| a miracle it's staying afloat at all.
| gwbrooks wrote:
| The whole point of federalism is that no single "captain
| visionary" has enough power to really enforce his/her will.
| deelowe wrote:
| The US government isn't supposed to be efficient. Quite the
| opposite, really.
| fullshark wrote:
| But people disagree about what makes the country "a
| better/worse place" and that disagreement leads to political
| parties and the need to win to promote policies they agree
| with. Just consider any wedge issue to see how this works, e.g.
| abortion and the fight over supreme court justices as a result.
|
| The issue is the rhetoric these days is dominated by useful
| idiots online spouting talking points and propaganda to the
| point that "debates" are nothing more than whatever scores
| points (literally points = social media likes).
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Politics is about making the country a better place FOR YOUR
| GROUP, whatever that group may be. There are many groups, with
| competing, incompatible definitions of "better." That's why
| "politics" exists in the first place. It's not a bunch of
| enlightened scholars competing to find the best solutions to
| hard problems, it's any number of tribes fighting to secure a
| piece of the pie for their people.
|
| So yes, it's absolutely about winning. Losing means that your
| group suffers, and eventually that your group (ideologic,
| geographic, economic or, grimly, even ethnic) ceases to exist.
| devtul wrote:
| Reminds me of how important individual rights are, the
| smallest and weakest group is yourself.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > Democrats today could improve their performance enormously if
| every staffer's computer monitor had a Post-It stuck to it that
| said "the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn't
| go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb.
|
| The Blues should steal The Reds "theme song"? Aside from being a
| marketing / identity mistake, this won't be true much longer. The
| demographic trends seem to favor The Blues. That is, the country
| is getting less white and more like the demos that tradionally
| favor The Reds. Mind you, of course, not every one of these will
| go Red, but unless there's some sort of crazy inversion, time
| favors Team Red.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Non white groups are also becoming more Republican, as seen in
| the 2029 election.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Who cares about the voters? Please the donors and the media
| barons and the Knights of Influence, and let them render all such
| worries irrelevant.
|
| The only reason to think of the voters is as a bugbear to keep
| your own folks in line. If their behavior gets too egregious the
| voters might wake up and realize "ants don't need to serve
| grasshoppers" and then there's all sorts of fuss.
| perl4ever wrote:
| The typical voter didn't take a class in statistics. I know I
| didn't.
|
| As far as I know, 99.999999..% of the voters are not at the
| median, so it escapes me why anyone should be concerned with the
| person in the middle.
|
| Also, what if the number of voters is _even_? Then there _is no
| median voter_ , it's just an abstraction.
|
| What is a median in multiple dimensions, anyway? Couldn't it
| easily be far away from _any_ individual? There was a thing that
| 's probably been on HN multiple times about how virtually nobody
| is "normal" in, say, five or more characteristics at once.
| usmannk wrote:
| Is there a phrase coined for responding to the title of a post,
| while ignoring all content?
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I mean, the title is often the most important part of a post.
| It's a boiled down version of what the creator wants to
| present to the world. In this case, it's a very badly boiled
| down idea.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| I'd call that a "median comment."
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Also, I'd like to point out: "Median" is relative to the scale
| you're plotting against. You can't combine multiple scales and
| treat them as one. The median voter may be white on the scale
| of race, may be 50 on the scale of age, may not be college
| educated on the scale of education, but that doesn't mean half
| the voting population is white, over 50, and not college
| educated. If you naively combine the statistics for instance,
| you wind up with that representing ~26% of voters (.74 * .56
| *.63).
| PeterisP wrote:
| You might argue that targeting a representative/"median" voter
| may a bit more effective than targeting the the average/mean
| voter, who (as you may observe) has one testicle and one
| breast, very unclear opinions on anything that matters, and is
| even more unreal than any randomly sampled person
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-10-03 23:00 UTC)