Follow up to previous post: initial numbers from election night looked like Trump over-performed polling averages between 3 – 5%. My calls for OH, NC and FL went the other way and lo as such, election day became election week. Final tallies TBD due to the closeness of GA and AZ. (and maybe WI — haven’t looked lately)

I’ve been returning periodically to the passage below from Heather Cox Richardson and mean to sit with it a while in the days to come:

This election was not particularly close, but pundits warn that the fact that 70 million Americans voted for Trump and 74 million and counting voted for Biden shows that we live in two very different Americas, and that, for all his talk of unity, Biden will have a hard time finding common ground with Trump supporters.

Pundits suggest that the two different political ideologies in America are about values and principles, but it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” According to political historian Rick Perlstein, a scholar of the right, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling listeners that Democrats have stolen the election, and urging his listeners to abandon the Republican establishment, which did not sufficiently back Trump.

Entertainment personality Alex Jones is more extreme. He showed up to the Maricopa County, Arizona, counting center, where he told the crowd that “The Bidens are Communist Chinese agents” and urged listeners to fight “those scumbag Nazi bastards.” Jones owns a far-right conspiracy theory website aptly named InfoWars. According to an article by Veit Medick in Der Spiegel, about two-thirds of his income comes from the merchandise he sells to combat the conspiracies he talks about.

The Republicans’ alternative reality is quite literally deadly. Although 82% of Trump voters believe the pandemic is at least somewhat under control, today America had more than 122,000 new infections, and more than 1100 people died. An analysis by the Associated Press shows that 93% of the 376 counties with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases per capita voted for Trump.

source: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-6-2020

The emphasis is mine, but in a victory lap where Democrats keep mentioning “Science” in their speeches, and Republican activists are in front of polling sites yelling “fake news” it seems epistemology is an elephant in this room we share.