Crunching the numbers from the election

I can't talk about the election with my students in class. It's not directly relevant to my subject matter in any way that would justify it. Instead, I put these numbers up on the board:

Voting Eligible Persons in the US: 231,556,662
Registered Voters in the US: 200,081,377
Registered Voters as a percentage of eligible voters: 86%
Presidential Ballots Cast: 131,043,000
Presidential ballots cast as a percentage of eligible voters: 56%
As a percentage of registered voters: 65%
Clinton Voters: 60,122,876
Trump Voters: 59,821,874
Clinton Voters as a percentage of the registered voters in the US: 29.9%
Trump Voters as a percentage of the registered voters in the US: 29.8%
Clinton voters as a percentage of eligible voters: 25.8%
Trump voters as a percentage of eligible voters: 25.78%

That's all I put on the board. Then I said, "we have elections all the time. If you vote, make sure everyone you know is registered. Make sure everyone you know who is registered votes."

But let us put these numbers in greater context:

Clinton voters in the primaries as a percentage of eligible voters: 7.3%
Trump voters in the primaries as a percentage of eligible voters: 5.74%

If we presume that the percentage of Trump voters in the primaries (the real die-hard Trump-enthusiasts) were to remain constant over the whole population of the US (324,118,787), we would have 18,604,418. This is less than the population of Texas or Florida. It is less than the population of New York City.

Let us reframe how we talk about the violence we see unfolding in pockets across the country. It is not the fault of "half the people in the country." At worst, it is the fault of 5% of the country who suddenly think that they are 50% of the country.  And since there are 195 million white folks in this country, it's not even ten percent of that group (and I don't presume they're all white, although my guess would be they are likely "white-identified").

So here is my question: I'm seeing all sorts of media convulsions about how these folks were ignored. Perhaps what we need to ask is what middle ground do we all have once we exclude this 5% from our reckonings. For example, one of my friends from Arizona posted a link to a Christian apologist who thinks very much the same way about literature that I do. And I know that many of the Marxist critics that I know believe in objective truth (many of the same objective truths) that Christian writers do.

I'm all for building common ground between us. I want to build common ground among the 95% of us who reject bigotry rather than trying to find common ground with the 5% who sees it as their animating drive.