(Note: I wrote this prior to the first Trump presidency – it seems that credulity metrics alone cannot account for the political climate in the United States of America.)

So the earliest cited reference to the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute” was listed as 1879 (not attributed to P.T. Barnum).

I’ve been looking for estimates of the global birth rate and total population in 1879, which yielded some stats from the alarmingly titled “Eugenics Review” among others, but I’m working from the following stats.

This means around 1879, the world population was between 1850 estimates of 1.26b and 1900 estimates of 1.65b, in 1879 (through 29 out of fifty years at a point when the global growth rate was estimated at 0.8% per year) the world population would have been around 1.48b. So 0.8% of 1.48b would be around 11,840,000 births per year, or 32,438.36 per day, or 22.53 births per minute.

If we assume the sucker born every minute is an aphorism worth applying to reality, that means 1 out of every 22.53 people (or 4.4%) born in 1879 would’ve been a sucker.

If we extrapolate that to our current situation, where we have a growth rate of 1.2% in a population last estimated at 7.35b for 2015, it means globally, we have 88,200,000 births per annum, and 3,880,800 of them are suckers.

If we’re looking at the American share of suckers, which for the purposes of presenting a non-biased approach to distribution, we’ll assume make up a proportionately equal share of the total global population of suckers, of the 7.35b people in the world, Americans make up 324.2m of them which, coincidentally, is also around 4.4% of total population.

So if 4.4% of the total population is in the United States, and 4.4% of that population is comprised of the suckers born every minute, my calculations estimate the total population contains around 14,264,800 suckers. If we control for the 22.1% of the American population under 18, we’ve got an estimated 11,112,279 suckers of voting age in the United States.

In 2016, Trump received 13.3m primary votes, but I haven’t run the stats on avowed racists yet, so that might explain the disparity. Fortunately, the average margin of victory on popular votes from 1824 up through 2012 has been 8.92%, so it is unlikely this election will be determined by the suckers alone.

Everyone, please #registertovote.