We Don’t Need Civil War, We Need to Split the Country
A 50/50 country is nuts!
I knock this column out in frustration on Wednesday Nov 9, 2022, the day after the U.S. mid-term elections, before the count is complete. While the balance of the Senate has not yet been determined, it looks likely to remain 50/50. The balance of the House has not been determined either, though it looks like the Republicans will take it. Whatever way they go, I am disgusted with this outcome. In fact, pretty much everybody it disgusted with it. Though the country is split 50/50, everybody thinks it is so disgustingly obvious that my side is correct and follows the facts, while the other side is dangerously wrong and living in a fantasy world.
It has puzzled me how such a large country can be split so evenly on massively important issues, and I think I’ve finally figured out why. It is exactly because the country is so large. If China had free and fair elections and a two-party system, I’ll bet you would see the same thing. (I don’t know enough about India to comment.) The thing is, it is the law of large numbers. You know this law, even if you don’t know you know it. If you flip a coin 4 times (or toss 4 coins one time), and repeat this experiment over and over, will you always get 2 heads and 2 tails? No, a significant number of times you would get 3 heads and 1 tail, or 3 tails and 1 head, and occasionally all 4 coins will land on the same side. Yahtzee! (How often do you roll a natural Yahtzee on a single throw?) But if you toss 100 coins (or 1 coin 100 times), how often will you get all 100 coins on the same side? Maybe not in your lifetime. You probably won’t ever see even 50 coins the same. But you will easily see a 51/49 split and a 52/48 split. Maybe even as much as a 60/40 split. But you see, with a larger number of coins, your result stays closer to 50/50. Now imagine 120 million coins! It is pretty much always going to come out damn near 50/50, and that is our election right there.
This chart from this article shows how the odds tend to cluster more tighly around 50/50 as the number of coins (or coin tosses) increases.
But why is it that the odds of a given voter going Republican or Democrat should be 50/50, like a fair coin toss? On the face of it, it would seem unlikely. However, our elections see a tremendous amount of resources and scientific analysis trying to persuade you to one side or the other. The resources and smarts applied on each side roughly balance each other out. I argue that the magnitude and effectiveness of the effort swamps the voters individual will and thus the results balance each other out as well. It is not a 100% solid theory, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. All of our national elections come out dam near 50/50, and the election is won by a hair’s breadth. For example, though just a state-wide election, in Georgia, a good senator Raphael Warnock is running against a ham standwich, yet almost half of the voters have been persuaded to vote for the ham sandwich.
It didn’t used to be this way. Johnson beat Goldwater by 22 percentage points in 1964. Nixon beat McGovern by a 23 points in 1972. Saint Ronald the Reagan crushed Modale by 18 points in the popular vote, but 90 points in the electoral college! In fact, here is a chart from Statista of the point spread in Presidential elections historically.
The downward trend in the point spread since FDR and especially since Reagan is obvious. (The W. Bush elections are anomalously low for some reason; I wonder why?)
Why should this trend be? What accounts for us trending more and more toward a 50/50 country? I think it is due to the increasing power of the forces tryinig to persuade us to vote for each side. On the one hand, the amount of money spent has been skyrocketing, especially since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision unleashed corporate and foreign (through blind PACs) money. On the other hand, big data analysis, scientific micro-targeting, social media, and probably Artificial Intelligence amplify the power of that money. Both hands amplify each other. These factors have almost completely swamped individual voter opinion (what voter opinion would be without these forces) and have driven the power of each side’s efforts closer to 50/50.
It is dumb to run a country this way. It is dumb to think it is a healthy democracy. There is only one solution: It is time to split the country up. There have been many proposals of how to split it, which are easily found with a Google search.
Personally, I favor something like this, keep it simple:
This column isn’t about advocating for any particular map. My only argument is that if 50% of the country wants one kind of thing and the other 50% wants something much difference, we’re never going to be able to make much progress in either direction. So let’s break it up into multiple countries. The “blue” (liberal, Democratic, Socialist) countries can have their progressive policies and the “red” (conservative, Republican, Fascist) countries can eliminate all taxes on the wealthy.
One big issue with breaking up the country is that every state has both red and blue voters. Even states that have a preponderance of one still has a lot of the other. If you don’t like the country you wind up in, you have a choice: stay there and suck it up (and try to change it), or move to a country your values are more in line with. It is a tremendous burden on those brave souls who are currently minorities in their states or cities or districts, but this has happened before. After the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War, so many Black people headed north that the movement is called the Great Migration. We would see more Great Migrations after splitting up the country, but only this will get us to a better result for the greater numbers of people. (If you are not familiar with the Great Migration, it is fascinating to read about. The Wikipedia article begins, “The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970.”) In fact, history has seen many Great Migrations.
I hope democracy can hang on by the skin of its teeth through these troubled times, but we shouldn’t have to have this stress in our lives. Let’s break up the country so we can live better and less stressful lives in countries that more closely match our values. Are you with me?
— Lannie Rose, November 2022
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
