Harold Meyerson: "A post-election numbers game"

Elections always yield a cascade of numbers that nerds such as I rummage among in search of meaning. Here are a few that I think help explain Tuesday's results:

Zero - The number of newly elected Republican senators in genuinely contested Senate races (excluding, therefore, those like North Dakota's) who carried voters ages 18 to 29. Republicans may have picked up seats in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin, and held them in Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio, but young voters in those states voted Democratic. Even in Ohio, where Republican Rob Portman beat Democrat Lee Fisher by 18 percentage points, Fisher won the youth vote 49 percent to 45 percent. In the national exit poll on House voting, the Republicans lost the 18-to-29-year-olds by 17 points, and did better the older the voters got. Moral: There was absolutely a Republican wave on Tuesday, but it looks more like the wave of the past than the wave of the future. Then again, as Faulkner reminded us and as the Republicans continually hope, the past isn't necessarily dead.

One - The number of white Democratic House members in the next Congress who will come from the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina). Democrats still send nine members from this long-ago Democratic region to the House, but eight of them are African Americans from districts in which whites don't make up a majority. Democratic strength in the white South began its downward plunge when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, but until Tuesday, there were still seven white Democrats in Congress from the Deep South. Now there's just one, Georgia's John Barrow.

Twenty-four - The gap, in percentage points, between the levels of support for Democrats and Republicans among white voters without college degrees who have union members in their household and white voters without college degrees who don't. In Tuesday's national exit poll on House voting, working-class whites voted overwhelmingly for Republicans - unless they lived with or were themselves union members, in which case they supported Democrats by a margin of 55 percent to 43 percent. Working-class voters from nonunion households backed Republican candidates 68 percent to 31 percent - a huge difference. It's not because unionized UPS drivers and nonunion FedEx drivers, say, are two different species of human. It's because the unions' political education and mobilization programs are very effective.

Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/04/AR2010110406639.html

and they will once again find themselve gutted, trussed and roasted, all the while blaming it on those damned brown skinned people and the unions.

There is a funny thing about airing out things. Including things like racism.

If you show the issues of race, those with those issues can have more resolve, but with education there becomes fewer of them. So if you are purging an ideological concept, then there is also an amplification of the bad side of it, so it can be seen, then learning from that.

If it is not seen, then nothing is done about it, while if it is seen, it can suck in people of like mind of the topic. However that also shows them and others what their mind is like.


So it follows the pattern of inflate, peak and burst, bubble like. The inflate is the release of the stored energy in the macro on some topic like race concepts, the peak is when they are seen for what they are, and the burst is both them an other people learning from what is going on.

The same way can happen for a better idea, but in theory, the better idea that inflates, and peaks, the learning adds strength to that concept and it does not overreach or deflate, but stabilizes with a better ideal.


So the complexity is to let the bad inflate so it can be seen, and have things that show it, then let education diffuse it before people get hurt, a fine line, because the same phenomenon can lead to wars. And while doing that also supporting the better inflation of better ideas that can be accompanied by better education and rational argument of why the ideas are better. And learning if a person is incorrect.


A simple test of racial bias.

Think of a world 1000 years in the future where everyone is white.
Think about it awhile.

(pause and think on it)


















Now think of a world 1000 years in the future where everyone is of brown complexion.

Think about that awhile.













If you did not have the same thought on both concepts then you have a racial bias. Most people do, and having some bias is normal, not knowing that, and not checking your behavior if you have that bias is where problems occur.

Side note, some people can not actually feel what a thought feels like, so if you had no feeling on either concept, you may have a feeling blocker, and not actually thinking and feeling what an idea feels like. If you just read it and felt nothing, go back and think about it see if you can find some feeling about the topic. Many people have feelings of loss of diversity on that topic, many have feelings of fear from both sides, or feelings of one result being better then the other if based on bias.