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Likely Voters

Barry Dredze
3 min readDec 7, 2021

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The County Election (1852) by George Caleb Bingham (St. Louis Art Museum)

We live in weird times. Never mind the illusion of America leading the world, in the manner of Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” Americans are visibly cracking under the strain of our own stated ideals and national aspirations.

News stories and scattered recent local election returns reveal a confused and freaked out American electorate these days. In Texas, “QAnon conspiracy theorists gathered in downtown Dallas to await the return of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who died in 1999,” Austin NBC affiliate KXAN reported, about “hundreds” of these people gathered on November 2, 2021, at Dealey Plaza. “Believers say the return of JFK Jr. in the city and spot where his father died in 1963 would begin the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president, according to several QAnon-affiliated social media accounts.” That did not happen. But the following morning after its most recent Election Day, the grade school kids of Virginia were safe from the post-graduate curriculum of critical race theory after their fresh Republican governor-elect Glenn Youngkin strutted across the stage at a victory rally for his death cult to the tune of Norman Greenbaum’s 1970 top-40 hit single “Spirit in the Sky.”

The American electorate, in descending quantities, consists of qualified voters, registered voters and likely voters. Political polling results are determined by “Likely Voters.” There is no saying with any real degree of…

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Barry Dredze
Barry Dredze

Written by Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.

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