The Atlantic: Why Christians Overwhelmingly Backed Trump

And despite the vulgar language Trump was heard using in the Access Hollywood tape, which many social conservatives found off-putting, 81 percent of white evangelical Christians still voted for Trump, as did the majority of people who attend religious services once a week or more. (Catholics were slightly more divided than born-again protestants, but 60 percent still went for Trump.)

Trump’s embrace by these groups might signal the importance of abortion—an issue on which at least a fifth of Americans say they will not compromise when voting. In 2015, 21 percent of Americans said they would only vote for a candidate who shared their abortion views, up from 13 percent in 2008. [...]

Richard Land, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary and part of Trump’s evangelical advisory committee, “believes evangelicals were motivated to vote in unprecedented numbers because of Hillary Clinton’s record on abortion,” according to the Huffington Post.

Though Trump hasn’t been their most steadfast ally, several pro-life activists celebrated his victory Tuesday.

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Salon: White rage against the machine: President Donald Trump is a historical shock — unless you study American history

Racism and sexism combined to defeat Hillary Clinton. This outcome is as much a backlash against Barack Obama as it is against a woman being elected President of the United States of America. America is a country divided against itself where political ideology and polarization are deeply intertwined with racial animus, sexism, and hostility to the Other. If politics is a story of action and reaction, the Age of Obama was punched in the face on Election Day by the Age of Trump.

Authoritarianism has been on the rise in American over the last ten years. This is especially true among Republicans and right-leaning independents.

Consumed by an obsession with “economic insecurity” among working-class white voters (a conclusion not born out by public opinion and other data), the mainstream corporate news media refused to seriously consider the well-documented role of white racism and white racial resentment in motivating Republicans and those others who flocked to his banner. [...]

Ultimately, the overwhelming power of white rage is the connective tissue tying together all of the various reasons that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to win the White House. This is an old story in America, a nation founded on white (male) supremacy. Trump’s victory is in many ways a return to form that shows the Age of Obama, the civil rights movement, and yes, the women’s rights movements, were aberrations in the country’s history.

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TED Talk: Can a divided America heal? | Jonathan Haidt

How can the US recover after the negative, partisan presidential election of 2016? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the morals that form the basis of our political choices. In conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, he describes the patterns of thinking and historical causes that have led to such sharp divisions in America -- and provides a vision for how the country might move forward.

Quartz: We just saw what voters do when they feel screwed. Here’s the economic theory of why they do it

One of the most interesting experiments in economics is known as the ultimatum game. It deftly gets at a fundamental truth of human nature — about how our deep emotional programming cause us to do things that, when viewed through the lens of rationality, just don’t make sense.

The game itself involves two players. The first player receives a sum of money, and gets to propose how to divide it between the two players. The second player can do only one thing: accept or reject the proposal. If the second player accepts, then the money is divided between the two players as proposed.

But if the second player rejects the proposal, then neither player gets anything.

Approaching the game from a rational economic perspective, the second player should accept any proposal that involves an offer of anything — because the alternative, of course, is to receive nothing.But that’s where things get interesting. It’s not how people behave at all. [...]

But while China and the developing world have benefited enormously from trade, so too has the developed world. The benefits of comparative advantage are real. But the question then becomes: for every extra dollar that has accrued to the US and the UK, who has been the beneficiary?

Here’s a hint: it’s not the people who are voting for Trump and Brexit. These folks don’t care about the chart above, or what it represents as an accomplishment for humanity.

It’s not their chart.

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Slate: Trump’s Voters Don’t Support Deportation

How did Donald Trump, the worst major-party nominee in memory, get elected president of the United States? What were his voters thinking? A lot of theories and accusations are flying around, but many don’t square with the best available evidence: surveys of voters as they left their polling places. Unlike pre-election polls, which missed many voters, exit polls by definition are a survey of the electorate. So, with an understanding that exit polls can have biases or errors of their own, let’s take a hard look at the data. [...]

3. Hunger for change trumped other considerations. The exit poll asked voters, “Which one of these four candidate qualities mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?” The options were “has the right experience,” “has good judgment,” “cares about people like me,” and “can bring needed change.” Fifty-six percent of voters picked one of the first three categories, and Clinton won these voters handily. But 39 percent of voters picked the fourth quality—“can bring needed change”—and Trump got 83 percent of those votes. The “change” factor overrode everything else. [...]

9. Terrorism was a crucial factor. The exit poll asked, “Which one of these four issues is the most important facing the country?” Sixty-five percent of voters picked the economy or foreign policy, and these voters went for Clinton. Thirteen percent picked immigration, and those voters went for Trump. The backbreaker was the fourth issue, terrorism. Eighteen percent of voters picked that issue, and they broke for Trump, 57 percent to 39 percent. That gap, fatally, cost Clinton slightly more than 3 percentage points of the total electorate.

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Bloomberg: The Polls and Predictors Were Off, But Not By as Much as it Seems

That’s not to say that the forecasters didn't wildly underestimate many of Trump’s ultimate margins of victory. Take Ohio, for instance, where Trump was leading Clinton by more than eight points on Wednesday morning: an average of four pre-election estimates predicted he'd win by a mere 1.6-point margin. [...]

As a result, no individual forecaster can claim an “A” grade for Nov. 8. That said, FiveThirtyEight could arguably take home an honorable mention for its relatively more Republican-bullish outlook. The site's founder Nate Silver even received a Twitter apology of sorts from the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim, who over the weekend had savaged him for "putting his thumb on the scales." [...]

As this table shows, prediction market aggregator PredictWise correctly projected the winner in 42 of the 46 states called as of Wednesday morning, for a 91.3 percent accuracy rate. Five others matched this record, including FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times' UpShot model, the Huffington Post, Bing Predicts, and the Cook Political Report. When looking at Senate races, PredictWise correctly called 29 out of 31 races so far, a track record also mirrored elsewhere. (This count excludes the California Senate race, where two Democrats faced off.) As for the House, PredictWise managed to correctly predict the partisan makeup of nine out of every ten House delegations, based on those seats called so far.

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Time: This Map Shows How America Voted in Every Election Since 1824

The U.S. wasn’t always divided between blue and red states—the parties that dominated the national conversation once included Whig, National Republican, Democratic-Republican and more.

Electoral maps dating back decades reveal a lot about political change in the U.S. as the country grew and two dominant political parties emerged.

For some presidents, elections ended in landslide wins. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1936 election with 523 electoral votes, while his opponent Alfred M. Landon received 8. Decades later, the country turned almost entirely red, when incumbent Republican candidate Ronald Reagan carried 49 of the 50 states, with 525 electoral votes. He was the second candidate to do so, following Richard Nixon, who took 520 electoral votes in the 1972 election.

Check out election results going back nearly 200 years in the interactive below.

Independent: Ask a stupid question: Brexit and the history of referendums

The biggest question that emerged at last week’s conference on referendums at New York University was how to understand what people meant when they voted. [...]

Another finding was that dissatisfaction with the government was not significantly correlated with Brexit voting: the British referendum at least does not seem to have been hijacked as a protest vote against the incumbent government.  [...]

Vaizey traced the causes of the Brexit vote from David Cameron’s decision to pull out of the EPP, the EU-wide grouping of centre-right parties, when he ran as leader. The appetite for a referendum was whetted by the supposed betrayal of the promise of one on the Lisbon Treaty (Eurosceptics paid no attention, Vaizey said, to the “small print” of Cameron’s promise: “...unless it has already been ratified”). Plus there was the “relentless blaming of the EU for absolutely everything that went wrong”.

However, Vaizey said that he didn’t think that ultimately a referendum could have been avoided. He drew a parallel with Scotland, where he said that if London had stood against agitation for devolution and then for an independence referendum, it would only have increased the “pressure-cooker” effect. 

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The Guardian: Gordon Brown: We need a Brexit deal that heals the north-south divide

Remarkable new evidence from a study by the academic Philip McCann, The UK Regional-National Economic Problem, shows that while economic output per head, measured by gross value added, is near £43,000 a year in London – and as high as £135,000 in inner west London – almost half the UK population lives, in regions where output per head is below £22,325.

Indeed the regional divide is so vast that, at £13,500 per person, economic output in Gwent, Wales, is a tenth that of one of the wealthiest part of London; and in the Tees and Welsh valleys it has now fallen below that of Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia.

Of course, in both the north and south we are all better off than 100 years ago, but the divide in income, jobs and pay is increasing faster than ever. Average household incomes in Wales, Northern Ireland and the northern regions of England are around 60% of those in Greater London. Last year, when jobs rose by 277,000 in London they rose by only 1,000 in the north-west and fell by 40,000 in the north-east. In London 10% of workers are officially low paid. In the north the figure is 25%. [...]

All this leaves us with a United Kingdom that is united in name only. Britain now has the most extreme inter-regional inequalities of any country in western Europe, yet the biggest concentration of political power in a centre that is singularly ill equipped to narrow the divide. Quite simply, our London-centric constitution has failed to unlock the potential, unleash the enterprise, or even meet the needs and aspirations of, our northern regions.

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