A lot to unpack there, so I'll restrict myself to a single remark: your suggestion that the polarization metric used in the last paper was developed post hoc in

A lot to unpack there, so I'll restrict myself to a single remark: your suggestion that the polarization metric used in the last paper was developed post hoc in response to Trump's election doesn't match the publication timeline. The method[1] used in the last paper has been around since the 80's and has been used to study polarization since at least the 00's. It's a popular method used in many papers; you can even get the raw data and code as an R package if you'd like to hack on it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_(scaling_method) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_(scaling_method) [2]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wnominate/index.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wnominate/index.html