We aren’t telling the whole story about our current situation in the country. Forcing yourself to confront accurate data, to hold your own opinions loosely and be willing to hear different voices is vital to life success. It’s also going to be the only way we navigate through our current crisis in the country.
Let me give you an example using the election data from November. What we’ve been told, quite loudly, is that Mrs. Clinton won the popular election, which she did…but stay with me for there is more to the story. We’ve also been given the implication that our current President and his team must be some evil interloper, someone who snuck in when no one was looking and is attempting some heinous take over. I’ll address that in another post, but in response, Mr. Trump’s fans often are loudly suggesting that they have a mandate from the election results. Well…not so quickly.
Our population, estimated by the Census Bureau for July 1 2016 was 323,127,513. To help us, we need to eliminate those under 18 since they can’t vote. The Census Bureau says that is 22.9% which would be almost 74 million kids.
According to statisticbrain.com, there were over 146 million people registered to vote in 2016. The eligible voters would be, based on population alone, around 249 million, but of course not everyone gets to vote due to various reason such as being incarcerated. The census bureau reported numbers from 2014 that 220 million could vote, with only 142 million registered.
For the 2016 election, around 129 million people voted. That is almost 90% of the eligible voters which is quite wonderful. For what it’s worth, this is evidence of a strong trend that more citizens are participating. In the 1996 election, only 65% of the registered voters voted, around 96 million. Since the new millennium, all 5 of our Presidential elections have had over 100 million voters; over 120 million since 2004.
However, this casts a strong light not only on the 20 million registered voters who didn’t participate, but the roughly 78 million who didn’t even bother to register. And that’s what takes us back to looking at the whole story. See, one of the things I teach my students is that as a historian, I am not at liberty to choose which facts or evidence I want to see as I study the past (or present). My job is merely to uncover the facts and then let it be what it is. Hiding the truth from ourselves is like the person who didn’t like the fact that they were not physically healthy, so they just got rid of all the mirrors in their house.
So, let’s look at these two points from the evidence. First, the data shows a far more evenly split country on the actual election than is usually told. Mrs. Clinton won (per the NY Times) 65,853,625 votes to Mr. Trump’s 62,985,106…a difference of 2,868,519. However, California skews those numbers as there Mrs. Clinton won by over 4 million votes. Meaning, if you subtracted just California from the totals, Clinton’s total drops to 57,099,837. Doing the same for Trump takes his number down to 58,501,296. Thus, regardless of the hyperbole we hear in the media and on social media, the country is split very closely with Mr. Trump winning the popular vote slightly.
Secondly, with 90 million people not voting or not registering, the idea of a mandate is foolish talk for the Republicans. Of course, it was also foolish for Democrats to talk like that for the previous 8 years. The 129 million or so who voted represent roughly 40% of the total population. The 90 million citizens who are 18 and older are about 28% of the country. It’s ludicrous to claim a mandate when you are elected by roughly 20% of the country. Again, note that is exactly where President Obama was in 2008. Then, the population was 304 million and he was elected with over 66 million votes, so only 22% of the citizens.
We can navigate this crisis. We must…and we will. And we can do it in a way that honors our historic national values of trust in our fellowman. We force ourselves to look candidly at the actual story, debate the actual issues and speak with moderation to one another about solutions. Or, we can descend into chaos fueled by distorted stories and false narratives.
I choose the first.