“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there “ Opening line from The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley, 1953. I had the great good fortune some years ago to study with the late Eugen Weber, one of the most charismatic lecturers I have had the pleasure to hear. Fortunately for us, many of… (read more)
Look, let me begin by stating that, although I have never personally visited any of the 54 counties that I am about to discuss, I am sure that they are not horrible places. Not only are they likely (having not visited any of them) quite varied and interesting, some are probably very beautiful and I… (read more)
Before I plunge into the darkness, I want to pull out from the 58 remaining counties in Pennsylvania the two or three remaining bright spots for the Democratic Party. Unsurprisingly the transformation of Dauphin and Centre, the counties I will examine briefly, is the result of increased diversity and higher levels of education. Dauphin County… (read more)
In the previous article I began a reassessment of the results of the 2016 Presidential Election in Pennsylvania, about which I have written a few articles already, as it was regarded before the election as a critical state in the election and, in fact, proved to be exactly that. I had examined the evidence and… (read more)
In the immediate aftermath of the November election I re-examined my predictions for the Presidential Election in Pennsylvania using the data available at the time. Subsequently the official election results have been published by the Pennsylvania Department of State along with the final registration numbers for November 8, 2016, allowing me to revisit the question… (read more)
Everglades City, Florida. Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017. I promised myself that I would spend the week of the inauguration camping and birding in the remotest parts of the Everglades, free from the news and distractions and aggravations of the assumption of power of the person (and his minions) who poses the greatest threat to… (read more)
In my previous entry I described an interesting observation about the demographics and voting patterns in Pennsylvania. I noticed that the sum of two numbers, the Percentage of residents with a Bachelor’s Degree age 25+ and the Percentage of Non-White residents, seemed to correlate with the likelihood of voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump…. (read more)
Not As Many Friends in Pennsylvania As Clinton Might Have Hoped ‘I have a deep-seated and, hopefully, irrational fear that somehow I am under-estimating the role vitriol, class and racial hostility, basic human stupidity, and cupidity play in elections and that this map might be not generous enough to the forces of darkness, but I… (read more)
Introduction Well, so much for going back to writing about old roads. I was hoping to put my election file away and literally move on. The “stunning” upset of Tuesday night has forced me to pull out the ‘Election 2016’ file and look over it again. I also reviewed the three articles I wrote about… (read more)
As Election Day approaches all manner of wild and crazy claims are made in a desperate hope to get one group or another to the polls or, as I discussed in previous entries, to entice some voters to stay home. One of the major methods of attack is to cite polls showing one or the… (read more)
