Stuck in the Middle With You
January 30, 2020·5 comments
The gap between how elections are supposed to work and how they actually work runs deeper than most people understand. The median voter theorem assumes elections reflect aggregated voter preferences, but something else entirely determines the outcome: which candidate occupies the center of media narrative space. This isn't about bias or conspiracy. It's about how narrative structure itself becomes the deciding force, independent of what voters actually want.
• Mainstream media outlets gave Trump vastly more coverage than Clinton in 2016, and most of it was positive. This happened not because journalists supported him, but because of systemic business pressures that made his narrative impossible to ignore. The mechanism was structural, not intentional.
• The center of the narrative map in politics determines the election outcome, not the distribution of voter preferences. Using linguistic analysis of thousands of news articles, Trump didn't just dominate one corner of the political conversation. He occupied the literal center of all political discussion.
• Bernie Sanders dominates Democratic primary narrative space in early 2020, but far less completely than Trump did four years earlier. The narrative maps show Sanders as the median narrative candidate among Democrats, but he shares the central space with Trump himself as the frame of reference.
• Media organizations from Bloomberg to the New York Times are actively conducting a narrative assault on Sanders, and this matters measurably. When narrative centrality shifts, it changes electoral outcomes. Sanders was more dominant two months prior, and that erosion tracks directly to changing coverage patterns.
• The real question becomes whether the median narrative stays stable long enough for its favorite candidate to win. There's a gap between narrative dominance and actual victory. Trump had overwhelming narrative dominance in February 2016. Sanders has narrative advantage, but not dominance.
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Comments
I love the narrative maps. I love them here, I love them there, I love them everywhere.
That said, I don’t suppose there’s a way to make them a bit more friendly to the color blind? Shades on the grey spectrum? Unique symbols with each color?
Thanks for leading the Pack.
I am color-blind, too - we’ll see what we can do! Some of the problem with symbols is that there are so many nodes, and the type of symbol starts to become a muddy mess of lines if you start using asterisks, crosses, x’es and the like. Shades of gray works when the nodes are nearly adjacent and the comparisons are easy, but two shades of gray across the map are harder to discern (at least for me, a protanope) than the existing, slightly wacky color scheme.
But your observation is duly and empathetically noted!
Got it! Oceania is not at war with Eurasia but East-Asia. Yes, this stuff makes a difference.
Based on the political ads during the Super Bowl, it seems like white male politicians (Trump, Bloomberg) are trying pretty hard to convince us that they are popular with black female voters… Something tells me Bernie is doing better in that demographic than either of them. I love when ET turns their narrative lens onto politics.
The narrative never had Sanders in the lead. Sanders never has and never will eclipse any of the Money’s candidates in terms of occurrence in the narrative streams. You guys don’t think you do, but you adhere to the narrative as it applies to any force that might concern itself with folks poorer your clients. Indeed you promote and purvey the narrative, in which case.
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