I’ve long wondered why many US election outcomes are close. Even when the candidates are very different from each other, especially in the current polarized political atmosphere. When a candidate shows such corrupt, self-serving, opportunistic behavior as Trump, nearly the same number of people vote for as against.
I’ve wondered if voting behavior is really random.
From my education in physics and astronomy I know about Gaussian distributions, also know as normal distributions. Look at the Wikipedia page. The normal distribution comes about from the probabilistic outcomes of a random process, a random variable. The curve is often divided into segments with about 1/3 or 1/6 of the numbers in each. That aligns in surveys with categories like strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree.
Surveys of public opinion often reveal the MAGA base of about 1/3 of the population.
If a random process determines political opinions in a population, then you wouldn’t be surprised to find certain percentages in the “wings” of the extremes.
I think that choices have become more random over time as processes that determine opinion have weakened, including public education, peer pressure, social interaction and the neutrality of marketing.
Where there continue to be social mechanisms that impose mores, opinions and believes, then the distribution will be skewed away from the normal distribution. Even though public opinion surveys show high percentages in favor of particular policies, such as public health care, the political outcomes when the public is given a choice is often close to 50-50.