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This One Little Forgotten Statistic Might Hold Clues To Why Trump Won The 2016 Presidential Election
In 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States. This was quite a shock to many. What was once only a bad joke in an old Simpsons episode became a painful reality. Immediately, people went out searching for answers to try to explain how this happened. While there are many potential causes, there is one little often overlooked statistic that could potentially be a big part of the answer.
This number has to do with what some researchers have called “deaths of despair”. Angus Deaton and Anne Case, researchers from Princeton University, have conducted research in order to illuminate this troubling trend. In the past 20 years, deaths from suicides, alcohol poisoning, and drugs have skyrocketed, achieving numbers not seen since the 1930’s. What is interesting is that there is one demographic that has seen a rapid rise in these types of deaths: single white men.
An analysis of historical data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) shows that the average rate of death from despair in the past few years is 2.5 times higher among men than women, and that rate…
