Why elections aren't data-driven
Let’s talk about elections.
If you ask anyone in the business world if your decisions should be data-driven, they will almost certainly say yes.
They may even look puzzled that you asked.
If you like getting a raise out of people and it’s not important to you to be invited back, you can ask them a follow-up question about their data-driven case for how they’re planning to vote this election season.
Elections are not data-driven
If elections were data-driven, we wouldn’t need political parties. We would simply review the data (we would also need a shared definition of which data is important), and the data would justify one candidate over another.
But that’s not how people decide how to cast their vote.
In fact, if you wanted to make a data-driven justification for any specific candidate, you could.
The issue is: which data is important?
Is the fact that Vice President Harris has raised more than $1B dollars since launching her campaign an important data point? Important enough to sway voters to her side?
How about the fact that President Trump has already been President before?
If you already believe one of them should be our next President, you can make a data-driven case to support your belief, and you can make a data-driven case against their opponent.
Elections are a form of Problem Solving & Future Solving
Our decisions to support and vote for candidates are based on which problems they commit to solving and which future they’re solving for.
This is made clear in debates when a candidate emphasizes a problem we’re facing as a society, clarifies how it’s the other candidate’s fault in some way or how the other candidate isn’t the right person to solve it, and then promises that they have a plan to address the problem.
Campaign rhetoric is also often grounded in Future Solving language such as “My opponent wants to create a society where… if that’s not the future you want for our nation, vote for me.” or “I want to create a future for our nation that looks like x, and I hope I can count on your support.”
Our entire bipartisan system comes down to fundamental differences about which version of the future we want to live in.
This is why elections are not (and should not be) data-driven.
Now if only they could be Reason-Driven.
Thanks for reading,
Brian
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