Yesterday afternoon, Nate Silver, the editor in chief of the obsessive political polling site FiveThirtyEight, tweeted two parallel-universe versions of the same electoral map. In one, the US is divvied up into red and blue states based on election results if only women voted.
He followed it with one that showed results if the polls were only open to men.
In the thousands of tweets and retweets that followed, people asked for other versions. What if just Millennials voted? What about just non-white people? How about non-straight people? Silver ignored them all.
That’s when the Internet stepped in.
Some parody tweets weren’t satisfied to stay within the geographic bounds of the original.
And some went even further afield.
The meme was a good distraction from more distressing appropriations of FiveThirtyEight’s work. Like when Donald Trump’s son, Eric, sent out an email this morning to Trump campaign supporters saying that his father was “making huge gains against Crooked Hillary that you can see for yourself.” Trump shared a gif of a map to prove his point. Which was shockingly (or not—who is even shocked at this campaign any more?) similar to the map Silver had tweeted excluding women from the vote.
Did it get worse? Wheeeeeee! (Sob.) Trump supporters made sure that the hashtag #repealthe19th started trending—twitter-fueled jokes, or half-jokes, or terrifying not-jokes, about taking away women’s right to vote.
Amy Phillips, a spokeswoman for FiveThirtyEight, said the team there was pleased the map has generated as much attention and conversation as it has. “While there have been several parodies, it seems that most people have shared it in earnest.” Misogyny, sure, but at least it was earnest misogyny.
