In 1960, JFK won the presidency by a narrow lead of 112,827 votes. On average, that’s one vote**** per polling station. It was nearly the narrowest victory in presidential history. Today, it would be akin to the employees of Apple deciding the presidential election, or the town of College Station, Texas.
Said another way; if, 58 years ago, you were heading to the polls to vote for JFK and you missed your train, fell sick or otherwise got sidelined, your lost vote would have been the deciding factor within your community.
Never let big party politics discourage you. Or deep corporate pockets. Or special interests. Your vote matters.
In fact, voting serves as the single most powerful expression of what brings us together as one people; voting says we believe in ourselves because ultimately we govern ourselves. A vote, by definition, is an expression of our shared belief in freedom, self-expression and a government of, by and for the people. Voting means we won’t always get it right, but we always try. Voting says we have different opinions, but we find the middle way that bridges the widest of differences.
Recently, politicians and pundits keep hammering on how divided we are as a country. This got me wondering; is their call for division real? And if so, what, precisely, are we so divided over?
Using objective third-party data collected by USA Facts, this piece focuses on a simplified set of demographic and survey data to understand the broad experience of the US majority. [1]
**Where do we come from?
** There’s 325 million American citizens. We’re constantly adding new people from various places. The most significant being child birth — about 4 million people are born every year. Additionally, we naturalize about 730k new citizens per annum (which is to say, grant full citizenship to an existing adult.) We also issue about a million non-voting green cards annually. Of note, we also issue something called H-1B visas to specialized foreign workers who get hired into US-based jobs. In 2017,we issued 197k– mostly in STEM.
Sadly, we lose about 2.7 million people every year to death. If we were a social network, our churn rate, excluding undocumented workers, is about .008%. Net growth is 2.9 million people, or .009%. (This is simplified; I’m missing many variables.)
**Who are we?
** The average American is 37 years old. 41% of us are married — 134 million to be exact. More and more married people aren’t having children (currently 37M, up 13M since 1980) which, in turn, has been driving up our average age. Many of us haven’t gone to college; 86 million have a high school or lower education. Our median family income is between $33k-$66k. Many more households, 56.6M, make less than $33k.
61% of America is white. Meanwhile, diversity grows unabated. We’re 18% Hispanic, 12% Black and 5% Asian. We’re a majority female with women representing 51% of adults in this country. Of note, white men represent 31% (pdf) of the population. We’re more sexually and gender fluid than ever before with ~5% of adult Americans identifying as LGBTQ. That number is higher in anonymous surveys and doesn’t include younger people.
On the issues, the American majority is pro choice, for common-sense gun control, for universal health care, supports same-sex marriage and believes in climate change.
In summary, our melting pot continues to melt and our realization of equal rights and equal protection for all citizens — in particular women, Black and LGBTQ communities — continues to gain momentum.
**Where are we divided?
** Economic opportunity is the blinking red light. To be sure, fixing income inequality is a defining issue for our time. It doesn’t, however, suggest we’re existentially divided. In fact, the data suggests most Americans are on the same page relative to our societal norms and values.
This is important.
It suggests that the agenda of division and separation isn’t coming from the people, but instead from the politicians who govern. In the din of finger-pointing, we miss the most important division of all: the disparity between the citizens and the represented officials who serve them.
**On government representation
** Government representation is the degree to which our elected officials are a reflection of the people they represent.
According to Reflective Democracy, “Despite white men comprising only 31% of the population, 97% of all Republican elected officials are white and 76% are male. Of all Democratic elected officials, 79% are white and 65% are male.” The average age of people serving in Congress is 57 and 61 in the House and Senate, respectively. This Congress is one of the oldest in recent US history. It also majors in Republican values that are often at odds with the American majority.
It’s not difficult to see how we arrived here. It turns out our system of voting dictates that whoever receives the most votes gets all the power. If I win 51% of the vote, I get 100% of the power. 49% is left unrepresented. When you have a winner take all system with low voter participation, it’s easy to manipulate the electoral process. Additional mechanisms of influence like voter suppression, gerrymandering and political king-making mean our election process is easily influenced. Control the process, control the outcome.
The good news, however, is that our government has 3 branches but only one body grants power: the people. And when the people participate in elections, systems of control fail to work.
Representation matters more than any other function in a democracy. The founding fathers designed a two-sided government with representation as the fulcrum. On one side is the citizenry of the people — the 325 million of us. On the other is the functionaries of government: the executive, judicial and legislative branches. In the middle, representation bridges the will of the citizenry to the decisions of the democracy. To this day, it’s a unique idea that inherently embraces transparency and change as core to the functioning a healthy government.
This is what Black Lives Matter is about.
This is what PRIDE is about.
This is what #MeToo is about.
Are we divided? Not in our hearts; not nearly as deeply and painfully as our elected officials would have us believe.
The biggest division, it turns out, is between us and our elected officials.
Representation is the only way we step forward together.
[1]Thank you to USAFacts for pulling so much of this data together. Links to other surveys, where appropriate.