A Sociological Eye

 What You’ve Heard Before This has been a very difficult week for those who voted for Kamala Harris. Harris lost the Electoral College by a lot (226-301), and over on the right, they’re calling it a landslide. It’s probably true that she lost the popular vote as well—but by a much, much smaller margin than the electoral vote gap, and one that continues to shrink as votes continue to be counted. (Thirteen states are still counting their votes as I write, the weekend after the election, and that includes the massive state of California.) The reaction of those who voted Republican has been predictable. If you looked at the rightwing news or social media, you saw a lot of exulting about the joy of “drinking delicious liberal tears.” Scenes of Democrats looking shocked or depressed and hugging one another were looped with gloating and laughs. That’s how things go today: when MAGA voters win, they taunt their opponents, and when they lose, they rant that the process was rigged and th...

    Yesterday, I posted on social media the graph you see here. It shows current levels of support for the presidential candidates according to gender for Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers. I asked folks reading the post for their theories about what is going on with Gen X, and got a lot of responses. So here is my report on what people had to say! First, to summarize what this chart shows you: Millennials and Baby Boomers are nearly identical in their views, despite having a generation between them with different political preferences. About 70% of both Millennial and Boomer women support Harris, while only about 38% of men in those generations say they support her. That’s a striking binary gender gap of over 30 points. (The survey does not consider the preferences of nonbinary people.) Generations Z and X show different patterns. Gen Z voters are in the youngest voting age bracket, and for decades voters in that bracket have held more progressiv...

  Every time there is a mass shooting, or the shooting of a public figure, people become glued to their information sources for news of who did it and why. That's a pretty universal reaction, because we want to know what the story is. We want there to *be* a story. We want to be able to fit this incident into our understandings of the world.   In the contemporary US, where people can hold totally different worldviews and beliefs, and even occupy "bespoke realities" happily served up by content providers, there is a frantic effort to control the narrative that emerges. At the moment I am writing this, factual information about Thomas Crooks, who shot at Trump and instead killed one rallygoer and seriously wounded two others, is scant. This frustrates the millions who want to hear a complete story, most importantly the why of it. What was the shooter's motive?   The fact that shots were fired at Trump in a period of intense campaigning primes everyone for a certain expl...