the election
I don't even know how to feel without numbers I can count on. I mean, I *am* having feelings right now, somewhere between "exhausted" and "sullen", but until I know who exactly voted for whom and where and how it changed from past years, I won't know how this happened and how to stop it from happening again. And without an accurate story to guide my understanding and my actions, I don't know how to FEEL feel. Hopeless? Determined? Angry? (And at whom, exactly?)
For the whole campaign, my feelings and the numbers were off. We're here in East Nowheresville, capitol of the Land that Opportunity Forgot. My county is one of the few blue spots in Illinois outside of Chicago, but all the counties that surround us are red, and many of my coworkers are from those counties.
From the start, it felt here like Trump had a good shot to win. Plenty of "I like that he says what he thinks!" and muttering about "Crooked Hillary". (Back when the primaries first started Andy and I were stunned that no one except grumpy old Bernie was going to give Hillary any real competition. Were we seriously going to nominate the most hated woman in America to represent us in the nation's biggest popularity contest? Yes, apparently we were. I know that the hatred is 99.4% pure misogyny, and that being hated by millions of people didn't end up working out so badly for Trump, but still, from here it felt like a huge risk to take.)
But see, I know that feelings and personal observations are limited. I'm an empiricist! I'd rather trust a large sample of observations! So all summer long I just kept refreshing 538, enjoying those calming transmissions from a sane and orderly world. Too bad the world in front of my face turned out to be the real one.
So numbers let me down, and I'm feeling shaky about that, but I still need numbers to help me cope. And they still haven't finished counting all the damn votes yet. I know it won't make a difference to who wins, but it makes a difference to the story that tells us what to do next time.
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