Can data tell us how US politics got this bad?

Trump is up, Trump is down. Hillary’s winning, but her emails are devious. Polls said the two were tied. Then they said, “Actually, Hillary can’t lose.”
If you’re able to take just a short break from mercilessly and repeatedly slamming your head into the hardest, most durable wall you can find for a minute, there’s a cool project going on from a Dumbo-based data analytics company that’s trying to figure out what the heck is going on with America this election.
“Our long game should be to focus on what has made us susceptible to the type of rhetoric we’ve seen on both sides of the aisle this past year and what we can do to fix it,” Frontier7 cofounder Tim Lawton explained in an email with Technical.ly Brooklyn. “We want to go beyond the standard ‘what’ questions and by using our technology get a better understanding of the ‘why’ behind voter behaviors and thoughts.”
Data can be great at explaining complicated phenomena, but it can also just add to the confusion, as numbers and predictions scream at us from every crevice of the web. Different results come from different inputs, and, boy, there are a lot of inputs.
Lawton and cofounder Naira Musallam, however, have created a quiz for users from which they hope to analyze the data to understand not just what they think, but why they think it.

The quiz, which is path dependent based on the answers you choose, polls respondents on their political beliefs and preferences, and “the what” could change those preferences. It asks how respondents perceive voters on the “other side,” including personality characteristics.
“We think this question will provide interesting data on ‘In Group’ and ‘Outgroup’ relations in the U.S.,” Musallam wrote. “It will shed insights on the work that needs to be done on a civil level to heal the divide, or to at least get to a more constructive debate.”
Sounds worthwhile, right?

Take the quiz