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The Politics of Assumptions.
Our Repeated Attempts at Second-Guessing.
In the 2016 Brexit vote, it was assumed, without much data that ‘of course’ the average British voter would not vote to leave the EU. Perhaps, this is exactly the case and the ‘average’ voter didn’t vote to leave the EU. Such a result calls into question notions of ‘average’ and is far likelier to be just an assumption. Then, later in 2016, but in the USA, the polls, and every interested party, insisted (often strenuously) that enough Republicans couldn’t possibly be persuaded to nominate the sheer ridiculousness that was the 2016 Trump campaign. We are, it seems, well practiced at second-guessing political decisions.
After Trump was nominated, however, further on in 2016, it was widely assumed — and the polls affirmed — what turned out to be another assumption: that Hillary Clinton would be the first female president and Trump could slink back to his branding empire after a well deserved electoral defeat. Of course, numerically speaking, it was a defeat for Trump: Hillary Clinton received nearly 66 Million votes, or as reported in the New Yorker, more votes than any white man in history and second only to Barack Obama. They just weren’t in the right states and the Electoral College, vestigial appendix of the 3/5ths compromise, gave the election to Donald Trump. Insult met injury in our assumptions as many people piled on to…
