“You’re a communist and a real redhead,” said one reader.
“Your crazy moderate centrism doesn't embold you,” another wrote. “It makes you someone who doesn’t conform to the status quo.”
“Just try to step outside of the far left stupid liberal box for once,” a third voice is heard saying. “There's no room for you anymore. So maybe it's time to get back to reality.”
We're getting feedback. These are all from last week. I've noticed that messages from readers tend to be increasingly categorized, labeled, and categorized. I think it's part of the polarization of society.
I miss Kshama Sawant, the former Seattle City Council member who called me “the West Neat of conservative columnists.” It reminded me that everything in politics is relative.
At the time, I was intrigued when pollster YouGuv decided to team up with The Economist magazine to take organizing to a whole different level.
They published extensive models of voting characteristics to typecast Americans' political identities. It combines responses from over 100,000 polls conducted over the past two years, and shows how every possible demographic variable plays into who we are politically and how we vote. The purpose is to predict how it contributes to how it is expressed through.
It turns out that in this database world, I am not a communist. I am a “heterosexual white male between 55 and 64 years old, an atheist or agnostic, and a college degree, living in an urban area of Washington state.” According to the modeler, in the presidential election That's all you need to know to predict my politics.
It predicts that there is about an 80-90% chance that I will vote for Democrat Joe Biden, and only about a 10-20% chance that I will vote for Republican Donald Trump.
They can also typecast you based on who you are. Try it out at economist.com/us-voter.
What's interesting, or disturbing, about this data is how entrapped political tribalism is in America. Demographics are truly destiny. One wonders if policy matters little and free thought is also on the endangered list.
For example, the most Trump-like voters on the right-to-left spectrum are heterosexual white men over 75, living in rural Oklahoma, who are evangelical and have not graduated from college. That person will vote for Trump 92% of the time.
On the other hand, if you're a 25- to 34-year-old lesbian Asian woman living in a California city, an atheist, and a college graduate, you're done. She's voting for Biden. According to the data, that's 99% certain.
There are thousands of diverse people in between, and the purpose of the dataset is to identify those elusive “floating” voters. However, since they account for less than 3% of the total, in theory, elections as they currently stand seem to be practically concrete unless there are some major changes.
There is a lot of talk about “disparities'' in politics, such as gender, race, and urban-rural disparities. And it's true that where you live or what your ethnicity is goes a long way in forming your political preferences.
But what stands out about this huge new data set is that some things are better than all others.
“While race is often cited as America's central rift, the single strongest predictor of voting intentions is religion,” The Economist noted. “A model that knows nothing except the respondent's religious affiliation can correctly identify which of the two leading candidates she prefers 62% of the time.”
For example, if you were to take me, a straight white male living in the city of Washington, an atheist or agnostic, and have a college degree, but instead just make me a Catholic, , or rather my voter type would instantly shift by about 30 points to Republican. I would go from a 10-20% chance of voting for Trump to 48% for Trump and 52% for Biden. I'd be a floating vote person.
If you made me an evangelical, I would move 60 points to the right and become a solid Trump supporter.
But if you kept me atheist or agnostic and moved me from Seattle to rural Washington like Omak, for example, I would only move 8 points to the Republican side. . In other words, religion causes much more political division than the urban-rural divide.
Of course, everyone is an individual, but these are collective predictions. But surprisingly, religion, which is no longer talked about much in politics, is the driving force behind everything.
So if a top reader had pointed out that I was a “godless” communist, he might have been on to something.
In exit polls from the last statewide election in 2022, when asked about their religion, 34% of Washington state voters said “no.” This makes them by far the largest religious group in the state. Protestants came in second at 19%, followed by Catholics at 13%.
According to the census, Seattle is the least religious large city in America. In San Juan County, the least religious county in Washington state, 49% of people are classified as having no religious affiliation, compared to just 20% in many red counties in Eastern Washington.
No other factor has such an impact on the trajectory of Washington state politics. This is why the state overwhelmingly supports abortion rights, is technocratic and pro-science. And why most culture- and morality-based politics don't work here, especially when there's a hint of confusing church and state.
Trump's decision to start Bible peddling? Just a hunch, but it probably won't work here. But he may know what he's doing when it comes to certain swing states. The Economist says: “The more people value religion, the more likely they are to vote for Trump. Piety is next to Trumpiness.”
Can we really be categorized this way? It seems that way, but sophisticated campaigns using artificial intelligence can be exploited to reach voters in surprisingly mundane ways.
Researchers at Stanford University have created an AI algorithm that analyzes car makes and models from millions of Google Street View images. You can use this alone to accurately predict how an area of town will vote. Forget about basic things like your religious beliefs and gender identity. I am my driving force.
“You are a communist”? anything. But the words “You're a Subaru driver” really mean something in modern American politics.