Shiri's Margin Attractor Part 2

Projecting the long term effects of HWFO’s most controversial political theory

In February of this year, HWFO published a political theory about why elections seem to be converging closer and closer to 50/50 splits in popular vote, despite each side getting more and more animated that the other side are psychos bent on destruction of the human race.

It’s a bit long, but if you don’t want to go back and check the details, I can summarize it briefly. 

Shiri’s Attractor

Our modern media maximizes for engagement. Political engagement is created by controversy. The most controversial topics, by the very definition of controversy, are ones which split the people 50/50. Therefore, over time, the political parties in a two party system must become polar, and must trend towards 50/50 splits. This is a mathematical system, and is independent of any given issue at any given time, because the “important” issues will evolve into the issues over which we are split 50/50, to maximize media engagement. 

I named the theory “Shiri’s Attractor” for esoteric reasons you can read about in the prior article.

This theory, like all theories, is testable by observation. What we observe, as the media has continued to evolve towards an engagement business model, is the popular vote margins collapsing over time. There are wide fluctuations in eras dominated by traditional media, but as echo chamber tailoring and engagement driven profit modes evolve, the trailing average of popular vote differential tightens up under 5%, and trends toward 0%. This figure from the prior article plots this trend up through 2020:

Is the theory true? It’s hard to know, but it certainly looks true. The 2024 election is currently ten days away and FiveThirtyEight projects Harris +1.5, which would push the trend line closer to the axis than ever before.

And this projection leads to a predicted Trump victory, because of how the Electoral College works.

Flyover

One can easily demonstrate that the Republicans have become the party of the dumb proletariat and the Democrats the party of the mentally ill bourgeoisie purely from data. Whether that is causal, or simply related to the modern differences in rural and urban living, has not been studied. 

Hillary Clinton’s election team in 2016 famously referred to the Midwest as “Flyover Country,” and this moniker has since been applied more generally to all of the less populous states. Whether these states fell into Republican control due to neglect from the Democratic Party, or due to cunning Republican strategy, or due to the relative migration patterns inherent to intelligence and mental illness, or due to any host of other factors does not fundamentally matter for today’s discussion. What matters is this: “Flyover Country” gets a slight election boost, and it currently favors one party in particular. 

Our electoral system is set up such that each state casts a vote for every representative it has in Congress, one for each of two senators, and one for each member of the house. This means an individual’s vote in Wyoming is “worth” about 3.7 times as much as one in California towards electors. Most votes in the country are worth around the same amount, but the smaller number of votes in less populous states do have some outsized effect on the presidential election. It’s not a large amount, but enough to shift the line to win about 2.5%, as shown in the graph from Nate Silver below. While not intrinsically a Republican advantage, the Electoral College does advantage less populous states.

Projection

Let’s play with the HWFO graph from the prior article, throw out the current parties, and simply presume that one party dominates the urban vote and the other dominates the rural vote. Next, presume Shiri’s Attractor is real, with the media increasingly making its clickbait money by pitting rurals against urbans for engagement, such that the country trends towards zero vote differential over a long enough horizon. 

Trendlines that approach zero on the x axis are typically shown through exponential decay functions, which leads us to the conclusion that at some point in the future the rurals seize permanent control of the presidency due to electoral college advantage alone. If you plot this on a graph, the transition to relatively predictable rural control of the office of the president begins in 2028.

Let’s go through this graph’s conclusions in layman’s terms. Over time the country gets divided into more and more even splits in terms of population by the media seeking engagement. If trendlines hold, then the splits become less than 2.5% differential in popular vote in 2028, and continue to shrink. From that point on, the rural electoral college advantage controls the presidency. The media obsession with the culture war gives control to the rural states, and the party which eschews the rural states loses in perpetuity. Mathematically. The media obsession with monetizing culture war makes this inevitable.

This is all speculative bullshit. Even if it were true there’s no great way to “prove” it. The future is full of black swans and civil wars and foreign invasions and cults of personality which can throw any number of monkey wrenches into the mathematics. But in describing the intersection of media culture war dynamics with election mechanics, this theory seems more intuitively true to me than most of what I’m reading in the culture-war-soaked smooth brain media right now.

And if it transpires, the blues are going to really regret taking a huge steaming dump down the throats of the flyover states since NAFTA, whether you support globalization (as I do) or not.