Outside the bubble

I didn't vote for President this year but am interested in why things turned out the way they did. More 2024 election data from a graph I came across a few days ago based on exit polling, so it is preliminary given mail-in voting and probably other factors. Indicative, though:

Financial Times

The GOP margin increased for every group in these categories except white college women and voters over 65.

From David Brooks in The New York Times on "Why We Got It So Wrong":

Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.

Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate. ....

The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.

In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals. When Biden picked his running mate in 2020, he had promised to pick a woman, and when he picked his Supreme Court nominee in 2022, he had promised to pick a Black woman. In both cases her identity grouping came before her individual qualities.

In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition. ....

This is the idea that a person’s ideas are primarily shaped not by individual preferences but by the experience of the group. It makes sense to say, “Speaking as a gay Hispanic man …” because a person’s thoughts are assumed to be dispatches from a communal experience. ....

It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.

It turns out that many people don’t see politics and history through the paradigm of liberation movements. They are concerned with all kinds of issues that don’t fit into the good-versus-evil mind-set of oppressor versus oppressed.... (more)

David Brooks, "Why We Got it So Wrong," The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2024.