How Big Is That Basket of Deplorables?

I’ve been thinking about this whole Basket of Deplorables™ thing Hillary Clinton has been talking about. Frankly, I think Basket of Assholes flows much better. But it got me thinking, exactly how many deplorable people does Hillary Clinton think live in our nation? People truly worthy of the title “Deplorable”. Clinton herself defined them as “rapists, murderers, white supremacists”. You know, deplorable… but not assholes. I want to know, exactly how big a basket does Hillary Clinton need to fit all the deplorables?

She said that half of all Trump supporters fall into the Basket. How many people support him? We have to wait until the election to get that number. But for now I’ll do what modern science does best: make a computer model (and by “computer model” I mean a Google Docs spreadsheet).

Trump received 13,300,472 popular votes in the 2016 primaries. That’s over 13 million committed Trump supporters. That’s also almost 7 million truly deplorable United States citizens. We’re off to a big start. So what about the rest of the country? Well, registered Democrats are already off the deplorable list since most of them won’t support Trump. Sure, there are a few outliers, but well within the margin of error. We can throw out felons as well. They can’t vote! Not deplorable.

So I start with a basket almost 7 million deep and ask myself, how many more potential deplorables are there? Joe McCarthy would be proud of me! According to this 2015 gallop poll I found on Quora, 28% of American voters are Republican and 43% Independent. That’s 71% of registered voters as potential deplorables. Let’s just assume that half of Republicans will vote for Trump. That jibes with Hillary’s reasoning. What about the indies, I’m in that group. The TV says that the polls are neck and neck right now so they jibe with Hillary as well. Let’s stick with 50%. This means that approximately 35.5% of registered voters are deplorable assholes. But exactly how many people is that? I really don’t care about the people, they are deplorable after all. I just want to know how big this friggin basket is.

According to this website there are 146,311,000 registered voters in the United States. 35.5% of them comes out to a total of 51,940,405. Almost 52 Million truly deplorable American citizens. Stay with me now, we’re almost there! The average human is 2.5 cubic feet in volume. Multiply that by the number of deplorables and we end up with a basket 130 MILLION CUBIC FEET IN VOLUME! That’s not even counting the handle! That’s enough to hold the entire population of Texas and Florida, with room left over for part of Ohio! That’s one big Basket of Deplorables we have in our country. No wonder she’s been talking about it so much.

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