Thursday, October 27, 2016

Don't Have a Horse in the Race But...

This is a messy political year and I am not saying anything new. I don't have any horse in this race, and the race is truly a horse race...however one sees it. But I am surprised, say even shocked, to see Nature have some PhD candidate form U Penn, that bastion of socialist values comment on the American public.

This writer for example opines:

My own research shows that voters with the largest discrepancies in their affective evaluations of the two candidates, which I refer to as emotional investment in the election, experienced the largest changes in perceptions of electoral integrity following the 2012 presidential election. Among supporters of a losing candidate, the stronger their affective preference for the candidate, the greater are their doubts about the fairness of the process. Regardless of the outcome in 2016, the supporters of the loser are all but guaranteed to have a historically extreme dislike for the winner. Unfortunately, we should expect confidence in the election result to suffer accordingly.

I suspect this young person has never been at a Bingo parlor or a racetrack! Democracy is messy, it always has been, even in Greece, just ask Socrates...

But why, one wonders, does such an esteemed journal, such as Nature, dig up some neophyte to comment on American democracy? Why not just ask people at random waiting for the Times Square Shuttle...after all, they are people!