What percent of white women voted for Trump - really?

I’d read that 53% of white women voted for Trump and 45% of college-educated white women. I’ve quoted those numbers. Today I looked for an update. It was a bit harder than I expected, many numbers didn’t split out the white from non-white vote. In Jan 2017 FiveThirtyEight wrote

…Trump won among white women by an average of 6.5 percentage points, according to exit polls, and he did particularly well with white women without a college degree, winning among that group by about 24 percentage points…

That article cited a CNN exit poll last updated Nov 23 2016. It had what I was looking for:

and

The numbers that stand out for me …

• 94% of black women voted for Clinton. Sanity lives in one cohort.
• 44% of college-grad white women voted Trump. I’d thought it was closer to 50%. This is still horrible of course.
• The white gender gap is smaller than I thought — 10%. White women are almost as a bad as white men.
• Among whites college made a 17% difference - much bigger than gender.
• 53% white college men voted T vs. 61% white non-college women. Among all whites college was a 17% gap. Education (or cognitive ability) was more important than gender.
• There’s a 48% gap between black and white women T voters. Sisterhood died in 2016.
• And, yes, 52% of white women, the majority, did make a horrible mistake.

The CNN page is worth remembering - my memory was only off by 1%. My takeaway was that race mattered above all, next education (or cognitive ability), and least of all gender.

Personal note - Google Scholar discovers something I maybe wrote and forgot long ago

Funny personal note.

While testing Google Scholar's new features I ended up creating a profile based on my (limited) academic publications.

It turned up one from 1981.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar…

The SURFEQL/MINEQL Manual.

I remember doing SURFEQL FORTRAN code for my friend Jim Young around 1980-81 as a Caltech undergrad (at the time Jim was a grad student and my boss). I imagine I might have written something at the time, but maybe Jim wrote the manual and put my name on it. I have absolutely no memory of this.

What a weird echo.

Understanding century 21 - IT, Globalization and urban-urban migration

In the 90s the world kind of made sense. Since then, not so much. I don’t know if teens truly are experiencing an anxiety epidemic, but any American growing up in the new millennium has reason to be anxious.

I think the root causes of our disruption are globalization (China and India) and information technology (AI, robots, advertising supported web, etc) leading to peak human/mass disability and the collapse of the GOP.

I’m now considering a third factor — namely urban-urban migration (though it may be a consequence of globalization and IT rather than a root cause). The population required to sustain a viable local economy keeps increasing; this is absolutely not what we expected when the net was young. Once a city of 10,000 was viable, then a city of 50,000, then a few hundred thousand. We seem too heading towards a million as baseline.

This is politically potent here because the structure of American government gives disproportionate power to low population density regions. The pain of these communities is politically consequential. This is usually described as a “rural” crisis, but these aren’t “rural” in the traditional sense. They are regions around large towns and small cities that are no longer economically viable.

I was a family medicine resident and a young physician in communities like these. Recent stories feel familiar — they remind me of my desolate drives along the Erie Canal and the IT driven end of the mill town. It’s a worldwide thing.

Humans have been migrating from rural areas to cities for centuries. It’s often been socially disruptive. It still is, particularly because of the way American government works. The dying regions have power, and as they lose their cognitive elite they are ever more desperate and easier to deceive.

See also

• Gordon’s Notes: Crisis-T: What’s special about rural? 2016. Similar ideas from a year ago.

Saint Paul Minnesota mayoral race: bikes and peds

The extraordinary St Paul Bicycle coalition has a couple of useful references on our upcoming mayoral race:

• Candidate statements
• Voter Guide

They are careful not to make a recommendation; they need to work with the winner.

Pat Harris is the Dem establishment favorite. He’s not bad on pedestrians but relatively weak on bicycles. Melvin Carter is probably the progressive favorite - strong on bikes and peds. Elizabeth Dickinson is green party - and as supportive as one would expect. I’d put Dai Thao between Harris and Carter/Dickinson.

We have started doing ranked choice voting. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Bike/ped/transit is big for my family, so I do like Mr Carter’s statements.