---- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
Nathan Newman wrote:
>If half the caucus plus one are for single-payer, that means the median
>Democrat is for single-payer.
-Wow, that's extreeeeeemely devious. If 51% are for and 49% are -against, the one who's for is hardly representative. A median isn't a -good way to represent something whose value is either 0 or 1; it is a -good way to represent something where there lots of different values -lying between 0 and 1.
Which is exactly why the visual graph at the original URL is so interesting. Instead of using averages or medians, which disguise these fundamental differences within parties, it shows their spreads and polarization over votes within parties.
And what is most interesting is that where there was often more agreement between the center extremes of each party mid-century, there is today far more huddling around the median of each party and polarization of parties against each other than in the past.
That is precisely why that graphic is so useful.
-- Nathan Newman