The Most Important Venn Diagram in Politics

Venn Diagram in Presidential Politics: 2016

I wrote previously about arbitrage (02/22/2013):  http://rostranovum.blogspot.com/2013/02/beginning-with-letter-arbitrage.html

Arbitrage is the method of finding a trading advantage because of some sort of unknown inequality. I’m fascinated by finding the angle or the area of analysis no one else is looking for?

There’s always a hinge-issue, a decision-point, a key deciding group that swings elections, and finding that group keeps political scientists busy every four years between major elections.

With so much of this cycle focused on the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the top candidates, feeding the cult of personality the salacious purple Kool-Aid of the 24-hour news cycle has dominated the thinking of the professional political class.

But I don’t care about the pundits; I’m interested in a large chunk of US citizens otherwise forgotten in our society. These voters are disaffected, disengaged, and outcast.

In the 2012, 58% percent of registered voters turned out for the very close election between President Obama and Mitt Romney; however, 93 million registered voters did not vote.

Currently, the federal agency which tracks employment, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, said 94.6 million working adults were no longer participating in the workforce—they aren’t employed and they no longer are seeking employment.

A Venn diagram is a diagram that uses circles to illustrate the relationships among sets, and in this case the two sets are as follows: Set A is the large block of registered adults who did not exercise their voting rights in the last Presidential election. Set B is the large group of adults that are of working age and cannot find a job, to the point that they are a group no longer even looking to find a job.

In a Venn diagram, the region in both A and B, where the two sets overlap, is called the intersection of A and B, and it is the area of critical importance in my current thinking regarding Tuesday’s Presidential election. It is the area where the non-voters and the unemployed intersect, a powerful voting block of motivated citizens (hypothetically).

It is at this intersection, where sincere political analysis raises a number of questions:

• How big is the overlap of Set A (non-voters) and Set B (non-workers)?
• Are the the millions in the overlap region motivated enough to decide to vote this Presidential election, as opposed to not voting last time?
• If these people do actually vote, for whom will that voting block cast their ballot?
• Is this voting group big enough to swing the election either way?
• How do these folks think about the direction of our country, or the quality of the nominees?

Wouldn’t this be a great group to track over the next 48-hours…

©Mark H. Pillsbury