[HN Gopher] The median voter is a 50-something white person who ... ___________________________________________________________________ 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] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-03 23:00 UTC)