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.
10 November 2016
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.
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.
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.
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.
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