It’s
9:30pm on election night and I have just signed onto the Facebook for the first time today. The first thing I see is a photograph of a chalkboard
sidewalk sign for a restaurant advertising their specials for today. The first item was an Obama Burger served
with fries or a salad for $8.00, not a bad deal, but Michelle wouldn’t let you
get fries anyways so salad is the only choice. The next item was a Romney Burger served with No Rights for
Women for $20.00, that’s a hefty price to pay to take back nearly 100 years of
civil rights. I continued
scrolling down my news feed and all I can see is a bunch of political jargon,
some being quite enthusiastic and seemingly wrote a short novel about how
important it is to exercise your right to vote and ended it with a quick jab
of, “4 more years!”
There
seems to be an overwhelming amount of positive Obama posts followed by
apathetic and disdained statuses mocking the whole system. Most of these apathetic posts were
vulgar and misdirected but one stood out to me, it was a quote by Leonardo da
Vinci and it read, “As every divided kingdom falls,
so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.” Maybe our eyes are bigger than our
stomachs but this is just some more food for thought.
As
I continued down the feed I only found two posts supporting Romney, which leads
me to believe that Obama voters are more vocal about their choice and will have
a higher turnout rate at the polls, ultimately giving Obama the win. This enthusiasm from the young voters
makes me believe that the more liberal proposals are going to pass like the
proposal 2, decriminalization of marijuana, and gay rights are going to get a Yes. But this is only qualitative Facebook assumption that focuses on the
narrow demographic of my friends. To
get broader demographics and more concise information on electoral predictions
I signed off the Facebook and looked
up the FiveThiryEight blog.
The
founder of the blog, statistical analyst Nate Silver, is highly regarded as
being the most accurate forecaster for election results. His blog has predicted a 90.9% chance
of an Obama victory with 313 electoral votes and 50.8% of the popular vote. Although the popular vote may be tight,
big blue states like California will give Obama the upper hand in electoral
votes. After evaluating the
qualitative on the Facebook and
qualitative data on FiveThirtyEight, I
believe that Obama will win another four years in office.
It’s
late in the evening now and I have decided not to post this blog until tomorrow
morning (Nov. 7) because the result are in but I don’t want to look at them
until the morning...
Four
more years it is. Raking in 303
electoral votes and a little over 50% of the popular vote, Nate Silver has just
been crowned the champion of all nerds!
His prediction was near perfect with only a 10-vote difference in the
electoral votes. Young voter
turnout (18-29 years old) accounted for 19% of all voters with 60% of them supporting
Obama according to the Huffington Post. Marijuana has been decriminalized
in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Detroit and the entire state of Colorado and Washington. Gay marriage rights have also passed in Maine and Maryland. Seems like I am a prophet, tomorrow
will be the day after today and you will eat your cake.
I feel as if the Romney supporters were especially upset about losing this time. I noticed posts and status updates that were so unbelievably over-dramatic that it makes one question the sanity of some of these people. That being said, the same could be said about Obama supporters ragging on Romney voters. I feel like a lot, if not most, of the people celebrating Obama's victory and putting down the Romney voters are the ones who aren't especially informed about what has happened all this time but are more on the bandwagon because, let's face it, supporting Obama has been the "it" thing to do this election. Regardless of how you look at it I honestly think both sides need to chill out.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you Steve, the popularity of supporting Obama seems more like a hipster fad than a genuine admiration of the man and the same can be said in contrast about the ridicule given to Romney. The whole Obama vs. Romney, left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative agenda is socially hostile and creates a huge rift between the people of this nation. In times like these, where we should be coming together as a nation, we are becoming more and more divided because of this immense political polarization created by our nation's two party paradigm. Like you said, both sides need to chill out and truly come together or dissolve completely so a new system, based on truth and the well-being of all individuals, can be established.
DeleteFacebook was a hub of political activity this election year. I agree when you said you had seen very few people on facebook cheering for Romney. I do not fully agree with you when you said "as I continued down the feed I only found two posts supporting Romney, which leads me to believe that Obama voters are more vocal about their choice and will have a higher turnout rate at the polls, ultimately giving Obama the win." Just because people are more vocal about who they are voting for does not ultimately reveal who will be voted into office. Let's be real, facebook is not the most credible source either.
ReplyDeleteI was very annoyed at the amount of shared information on facebook. It was getting old and rather annoying. I think the quote by da Vinci was absolutely brilliant and something that should be digested by the public.
My Facebook analysis was purely based off of social trends and assumptions that I could pick up on as I browsed through my feed so you are completely in the right to cast my prediction as mere speculation. Understanding that Facebook is merely a collection of social trends, I used the popularity of Obama on Facebook as a measure of sociopolitical trends to assimilate a simple prediction based on zero facts. Even though Facebook has as much credibility as Wikipedia, both still yield potent food for thought, like the da Vinci quote.
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