Why are we so evenly divided?

[UltraVires]

@RitterSport

I certainly didn’t mean to poison the well, so I apologize for that if I did. My main point is, the OP makes a claim – we’re 50/50 split, not 52/48 or wider. I dispute this claim – I think the election just a week ago shows that we’re not 50/50, since the Democrats were well ahead of that. The OP uses two disputed elections to make the claim, but there’s no reason that those two elections represent the country.

So, are we so evenly divided? I’d like a cite for that claim.

I think it is fair to say that the 50/50 split was shorthand for extremely close election results. I agree that the Democrats have the disadvantage of having their voters largely situated in close proximity to one another, mainly in urban areas, and waste many votes by having their Congressman elected by 82-18 majorities.

If you look at county breakdowns by red and blue,in recent elections, even those won by Obama, you will see a vast sea of red with little dots of blue here and there. So any outsized influence by the smaller states was a basic premise upon which this country was founded.

In 1787, the smaller states said basically, we are not going to join this union if the population centers in Virginia get to control everything and make our votes worthless. So a compromise was reached and it was agreed upon. The smaller states get a slight bump, not equality. California has 55 electoral votes and West Virginia has 5.

And it is only a fair compromise. The people in flyover country to grow your food and mine coal and make steel and make cars get to have some say so to allow you to live in urbanized areas. We did not agree in 1787, nor would we agree now to allow our votes and our ideas to be swamped permanently by the urban centers. We are a federalist society with states playing an important role. We don’t have national elections.

[Sage_Rat]

I’ll add another aspect that I mentioned in a different thread, which is general ignorance. If you have two options and no one has any real knowledge, nor much faith in their own knowledge, nor any sense that the result will really affect them in any particular way, then they’re just going to pick quasi-randomly.

Ergo, with a large number of people, you a statistically expected value near 50/50, based on a large number of random coin tosses.

[RitterSport]

@UltraVires

…

Thank you for the history lesson, but it’s irrelevant to the question of whether we’re evenly divided. I say we’re not, and my cite is the 7% or so advantage that the Democrats had in the recent House election and the 3% or so advantage in the recent presidential election. Hopefully, I’m not poisoning any wells – I think these are facts we can agree upon. It’s true that there’s a power balance that’s not in line with those differences, but the power balance isn’t evidence that we’re evenly divided.

The OP specified that 52-48 would not be even. I think the recent election showed that we’re more separated than that.

[guizot]

@asahi

Oh, I think you’re mistaken. We’re bitterly divided over the question of how to define America.

That description fits a minority, and it’s a narrative which helps the Republicans stay afloat, not to mention that most of the media loves to present it this way for entertainment value, but (from this report) there has since come up some contrary evidence of my point from above

@NYT--"These Americans Are Done with Politics"

A deep new study of the American electorate, “Hidden Tribes,” concludes that two out of three Americans are far more practical than that narrative suggests. Most do not see their lives through a political lens, and when they have political views the views are far less rigid than those of the highly politically engaged, ideologically orthodox tribes.

The study, an effort to understand the forces that drive political polarization, surveyed a representative group of 8,000 Americans. The nonpartisan organization that did it, More in Common, paints a picture of a society that is far more disengaged — and despairing over divisions — than it is divided. At its heart is a vast and often overlooked political middle that feels forgotten in the vitriol, as if the country has gone on without it. It calls that group the Exhausted Majority, a group that represented two-thirds of the survey.

[Miller]

@UltraVires

And it is only a fair compromise. The people in flyover country to grow your food and mine coal and make steel and make cars get to have some say so to allow you to live in urbanized areas.

California is a net exporter of agricultural products, we only have one coal plant in the entire state, and we build our own cars.

[Wesley_Clark]

@asahi

It’s because we have two Americas: rural white America and metropolitan multicultural America, and we’re going tribal. It’s a contest to see which side can motivate its voters to come out more.

This division is happening all over.

I believe Brexit did well in the rural areas, terrible in urban areas.

The far right parties in western & eastern Europe do well in rural areas, not in urban areas.

Erdogan does well in the rural areas, not well in urban areas.

etc.

[Wesley_Clark]

@Bijou_Drains

Mississippi is 40% black but they cannot elect a black person to a statewide office mostly due to turnout.

Thats because 90% of white people in the deep south vote republican, because the democratic party is the party that supported civil rights in the 1960s. Whites in the south generally vote for whatever political party allows them to mistreat minorities, and have done so since the country was founded.

Black turnout is about the same as white turnout, but elections are generally about 60-40 in favor of the GOP.

[penultima_thule]

@Sage_Rat

I’ll add another aspect that I mentioned in a different thread, which is general ignorance.

Given the apparent vast polarisation of the US electorate do you really think the number of these 50:50 voters would swamp those of the political devotees?

In any case, wouldn’t determining your vote in the polling booth after a coin toss be just as legitimate a method as somebody who in essence tosses a one sided coin and always votes the way their parents/grandparents did?

This “youse is too dumb to vote” meme that gets thrown around here rather frequently is just another insidious voter suppression technique.

[guizot]

@penultima_thule

This “youse is too dumb to vote” meme that gets thrown around here rather frequently is just another insidious voter suppression technique.

I don’t know what that meme would be, but the fact is that most people are ignorant and lazy with regard to civic functions and governance. Their understanding derives from TV and Facebook, which makes them easy prey for this false narrative of divisiveness, and which the right tends to exploit much more than the left, with characterizations of “elites” who for some unexplained fantasy reason hate “regular” people. (“Regular” people are everywhere–city, suburb, and rural–and their interests coincide much more than they are at odds. The real “elite” are just a very small percentage.) But the fiction of a “divided nation” persists, which the media happily serves up because it’s good entertainment–it’s good TV–and it also can get out certain votes, (rather than suppress them).

In fact, as the research I cited above shows, the interests of the majority of people (rural and city) are not divided. This is the reality which the narrative tries to cover up, and they usually succeed (thanks to TV and online mental laziness), but sometimes things are just too real for even that, as was seen with healthcare in the last election.

You wanna talk memes? The ultimate, false meme–the ultimate cliche–is that we are a “divided” nation, and because of sheer ignorance and laziness it’s getting exploited to the max, particularly by Trump, the GOP and Fox News. That’s the reason the elections results were so close. “It’s the [del]economy[/del] media, stupid”–especially online media which exploits laziness even more than TV.