A Big Data Jeremiad and the Moral Health of America

The average of polls were wrong. The past-performance-weighted, hyper-parameterized, stratified-sampled, Monte Carlo-ized collaborative predictions fell as critically short in the general election as they had in the Republican primary. There will be much soul searching to establish why that might have been; from ground game engagement to voter turnout, from pollster bias to sampling defects, the hit list will continue to grow.

Things were less predictable than it seemed. During the 2008 and 2012 elections, the losing party proxies held that the polls were inherently flawed, though they were ultimately predictive. Now, in 2016, they were inherently flawed and not at all predictive.

But what the polls showed was instructive even if their numbers were not quite right. Specifically, there was a remarkable turn-out for Trump among white, less-educated voters who long for radical change to their economic lives. The Democratic candidate was less clearly engaging.

Another difference emerged, however. Despite efforts to paint Hillary Clinton as corrupt or a liar, objective fact checkers concluded that she was, in fact, one of the most honest candidates in recent history, and that Donald Trump was one of the worst, only approximated by Michelle Bachman in utter mendacity. We can couple that with his race-bating, misogyny, hostility, divorces, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and other childish antics. Yet these moral failures did not prevent his supporters from voting for him in numbers.

But his moral failures may be precisely why his supporters found him appealing. Evangelicals decided for him because Clinton was a threat to overturning Roe v. Wade, while he was an unknown who said a few contradictory things in opposition. His other moral issues were less important—even forgivable. In reality, though, this particular divide is an exemplar for a broader division in the moral fabric of America. The white working class has been struggling in post-industrial America for decades. Coal mining gives way to fracked, super-abundant natural gas. A freer labor market moves assembly overseas. The continuous rise in productivity shifts value away from labor in the service of innovation to disintermediated innovation itself.

The economic results are largely a consequence of freedom, a value that becomes suffused in the polarized economy where factories close on egghead economic restructuring. Other values come into question as well. Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, brought a controversial conservative lens to the loss of traditional values for working class America. In this world, marriage, church, and hard work have dissolved due to the influence of the 60s pernicious counter-cultural deconstruction that was revolutionary for the college-educated elite but destructive to the working class. What is left is a vacuum of virtues where the downtrodden lash out at the eggheads from the coasts. The moral failings of a scion of wealth itself are recognizable and forgivable because at least there is a sense of change and some simple diagnostics about what is wrong with our precious state.

So we are left with pussy grabbing, with the Chinese hoax of climate change, with impossible border walls, with a fornicator-in-chief misogynist, with a gloomy Jeremiad of divided America being exploited into oblivion. Even the statisticians were eggheaded speculators who were manipulating the world with their crazy polls. But at least it wasn’t her.