Choosy Voters

I've had better things to do than follow the election coverage, and so I'm a bit behind the curve. I understand that former Vice-President Biden appears to be leading and likely to win, but I'm not invested enough in the outcome to look deeper. Looking for something else to read about, I'd check out The Atlantic, and found the following: A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath. My first thought was "Of course they did. We are talking about people who run for President, after all." Sociopaths are something of an occupational hazard at that level.

But a bit less snarky, and more to the point was the thought that he headline may as well have read: "A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Person Who Said That He Would Advance Their Interests at the Direct Expense of People They Don't Like." Just as accurate, if not as click-bait. But also nothing new. This has been a habit of the electorate for a while now. And not simply because the American public has somehow become more evil when no-one was looking. Politicians buying into partisan animosity and offering to have one side win at the other's expense are common, because angry partisans require that as a precondition of voting and other voters aren't driven away by it. And I feel that I'm repeating myself here, because I'm sure I've noted this before.

Because the Electoral College system breaks down the Presidential election into 51 individual elections, one for each state and one for Washington, D. C., relatively small numbers of angry partisans in contested states can really make the difference, and so the candidates need those votes. And the primary system doesn't quite guarantee that the angry partisans will have a candidate who will listen to them, but it comes close. And so while the overall number of angry partisans may not be large, they tend to be the ones leading the parade. And for them a sociopath who shares their anger, or at least reflects it back for them, is miles better than an upstanding citizen who doesn't.

And for everyone else, a sociopath who is openly on their side, is better than an upstanding citizen who is likely to ignore their concerns, because he works for the angry partisans on the other side. Electoral math is like any other math, one doesn't have to like the answers for them to make the equations work.