Super Tuesday and Dark Energy

No I'm not trying to make some racist joke at Barack Obama's expense. I'm just trying to make an astronomy analogy with the US political process.

Like many people I was very interested in the results from Super Tuesday. So I tried watching Fox News, CNN and MSNBC to get my political jones fix. Exciting it was not. Watching the election results is like watching paint dry. It was so boring that I flipped over to the History Channel to watch a show on dark energy and dark matter (a show I had already seen before).

Scientists believe that dark energy makes up 70% of the universe while dark matter makes up 25% of the universe. We don't even really know what makes up dark energy or dark matter - everything is purely hypothetical. The stuff we do know about only makes up 5% of the universe.

The United States has a population of just over 301 million people. On Super Tuesday 24 states are holding primaries or caucuses. Massachusetts has a population of about 6.5 million people. Looking at the results it occurred to me that it seemed like just 5% of that population was voting. It seemed similar across the board as far as turnout. The rest of the population might as well been dark energy and dark matter.