Breaking Down the Vote
By Quentin Albatross

The 2008 United States Presidential election set new precedents across the board. Americans voted in record numbers; many of them for the first time. President-elect Obama managed to raise more funds than he could spend, and most of it came from contributions under $200. Perhaps just as remarkable was the amount of polling and analysis provided by the media. There were almost as many polls conducted in October 2008 as there were for the entire duration of the 2004 election. And the analysis available to TV viewers on election night was stunning.

For example, CNN systematically broke down voting trends into various demographics. President-elect Obama won over the youth, while McCain won over the elderly; Obama wooed African Americans and Latin Americans, while McCain wooed Caucasians; the list goes on.

There was actually so much data that a lot of it went unreported due to time constraints. Most notably, the pollsters and pundits largely ignored the philosophical identifications of voters. The data is confusing at times and often ambiguous, but it does manage to provide some insight into the mind of the American voter.

Unsurprisingly, voters who identified themselves as existentialists voted unanimously in favour of the Democratic candidate, Barrack Obama. On the other hand, a shocking 70% of those who claimed to be advocates of Jean-Jacques Rousseau opted for the Republican candidate, John McCain. The Rousseau cohort was fairly confident that the McCain-Palin ticket would inevitably bring about a “return to nature” via further economic liberalization, as well as the prospect of war with Russia.

The post-structuralists leaned heavily in favour of Obama, but a significant portion also claimed to have deliberately destroyed their ballots. Meanwhile, Neo-Platonists, Machiavellians, objectivists and nihilists voted overwhelmingly for McCain. The former three groups cited individual liberty as their primary motivator, while the latter group stated that the name McCain “sounded cool.”

The Nietzscheaen vote was split in half, but this is not out of the ordinary given the ambiguous nature of Nietzsche’s work. In fact, this demographic might be statistically unreliable, as a recent survey of self-proclaimed Nietzscheaens found that most of them had only ever read isolated Nietzsche quotations on Wikipedia, which they took entirely out of context.

Curiously, Kantians were moved by Obama’s universal maxim of hope, but were also one of the largest cohorts of Ralph Nader supporters. Pollsters refrained from asking why this was, as Kantians are generally dull and unpleasant.

In the end, it may be the anti-theorists who offer the most insight in this demographic analysis. Perhaps the classification of American voters into demographic cohorts is unimportant, and worse yet, misleading. By reducing Americans to a collection of “isms,” one might neglect the importance of that fact that the nation has democratically elected a President who appears to be, despite the inherent limitations of his many “isms,” a fundamentally good man.