On the Iowa Caucus Results

[grouchyoldcoot]

You know, I'm going to say it. We just should not be in the same country as Iowa. Any state that seems to think that Santorum would make a good President, presumably because the greatest threat to the United States is ravening hoards of homosexuals, does not live in the same reality as I do. They do not live in the same reality as anyone I know

Comments

[baronalejandro]

We (the South) tried that once. You, the North, wouldn't let us leave.

Also, you are misinterpreting the results. The republicans of Iowa think that Santorum should be the republican candidate. Not, the people. Bear in mind that Iowa went democrat for 5 out of the last 6 elections, including for Obama.

[qiika]

Was there a candidate that it should have gone to? I don't see any good candidates for them to choose from.

[tangerinpenguin]

Just to be clear, Pennsylvania's the state that thought Santorum would make a dandy Senator, right? And that after two terms as Representative for the 18th district, historically part of a Pittsburgh Democratic stronghold?

(Not, by any means, defending him - just wondering where you're planning to draw the new borders ;))

[blk]

Pennsylvania would be a much saner state if there wasn't so much West Virginia between Pittsburgh and Philly.

[bhudson]

Somewhere around the Edgewood exit, presumably. A friend once described PA as "two world-class cities separated by Alabama" (or was it Mississippi?)

Dense urbanization and the GOP/dem border generally match up fairly well. You wouldn't get a viable country by cutting along that obviously.

[bhudson]

4% of the Iowa population voted in this poll, generally a group that is self-selected for GOP support. 100% of them voted for an asshat. But because 25% of them chose one asshat rather than the others, you want to split the country?

[grouchyoldcoot]

Yeah, it's true. It's not a very reasonable proposal. I do feel that there are two totally disconnected cultures in this country and that they shouldn't be trying to live under the same government, but you can't make a country by cutting out little circles for all the cities. You could help things a lot by doing a sort of red state/blue state divide, but I suspect Pennsylvania would end up on the wrong side of that.

I do wonder how much more functional the (two halves of the) US would be if they had indeed split at the time of the Civil War. The social tension would be lower in both the North and the South, I suspect.

[bhudson]

There are many more than two cultures in the US (and anywhere else).

[grouchyoldcoot]

I spoke imprecisely. I should have said that if one asked a series of N social, political and economic questions of a large set of M randomly chosen US citizens, used the binary answers to define the positions of M points in the corresponding N-dimensional space, and then used a k-means clustering algorithm to separate the samples into two clusters, the internal variance of those two clusters would be much lower than one would expect for M sets of N randomly chosen boolean values. Further, I propose that going from 2 to 3 clusters would not produce so disproportionately large a decrease in intra-cluster variance.

That is to say, of course one can define arbitrarily many cultures, but defining two of them is necessary and sufficient to explain much of what is going on in US society and politics now.

[genuinekfc]

The GOP race has been like Whack-A-Mole, so I'm hopeful that this trend will also pass. Either a different asshat will rise, or Santorum's questionable ethics will get more airtime.

Iowa only has 2.22% of the electorate vote for the actual election. Given that they went for Obama last time, the GOP voting in this caucus seem to be a fringe minority.