2016 US elections are fraught with a rancorous debate and character assassinations. At the moment there is total chaos which reflects a severe split among the American voters. On the surface it is hard to comprehend why there is so much polarization. But a closer inspection of trends shows this is not a new phenomena but has been growing steadily over the past decade.
Electoral College is uniquely American way of electing the US President, where using a "winner-takes-all" method, electoral votes for are all (but 2) states are pledged to the candidate who wins the most votes in a specific state. This is why everyone focuses on the state-level counts to see which states are "Red" vs. "Blue".
However, due to this oversimplification lot of information about the voter preferences are lost which might help to explain the current degree of polarization. University of Michigan professor Mark Newman developed different ways to visualize the past election results of 2012 using voter data at the congressional district on a geographic map as well as on a cartogram, where sizes of states re-scaled according to population instead of area and the color scale ranging from red (for 70% Republican or more) to blue (for 70% Democrat or more), Maps of the 2012 US presidential election results
As is clearly evident from the above Chart (D) in 2012 President Obama, Democrat (Blue) was reelected despite some massive opposition of very strong Red areas.
While Pundits are predicting a victory for the Democratic candidate (Clinton) in Nov, 2016, it is worrisome to think what would happen in the "Red" areas who are looking to the Republican candidate (Trump) to represent their points of view. Could this turn out to be like the election of 1860 when Abraham Lincoln won but later had to deal with the American Civil War. Could this once more be the Rise of the American Phoenix!!!
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