Wednesday, June 6, 2012

trivia fail

the answer: mckinley!  (nice work, bill!)  we knew it couldn't be teddy roosevelt (who succeeded mckinley but was too young), and then taft and wilson didn't feel right either.  so we went to backwards to mckinley.  victory!

this left us tied for second place!  the tie-breaker: how many popular votes did mckinley win in the election of 1896?

we had one minute to come up with an answer.

we (i) said 17 million.  my logic: the doubling time of the population is 50-60 years, i think.  60 million people voted for obama.  that makes 30 million voting for the winner of the 1950 election...15 million in the 1900 election...somehow 17 million sounded right.

the answer was 7 million.  7!  horrors!  the other team said 1 million, so they were closer and won.

enormous frowny face.  we were NOT EVEN VERY CLOSE AT ALL.

30 seconds later i realized the error in my logic about how many people would have voted for mckinley.  where was my fault, readers?

1 comment:

  1. Women couldn't vote, so divide by 2. Also, Jim Crow laws resulted in lower minority voting than now, so reduce to less than half.

    John

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