No, the existence of the “low-information voter” is not a myth. It’s a myth that it’s necessarily an insult or epithet.
Last year about this time it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to be our nominee. She had already started to gather endorsements while claiming she hadn’t yet decided to run. No one else seemed interested in running. And I knew I didn’t know enough about why people were excited about her. Had I voted last April, I would have been “low information” on Hillary Clinton. And that is as someone who is on this site and others every day, gobbling up as much information as I can tolerate, and more, about politics.
I asked for input and was rebuffed, but that is for a different diary.
Earlier in Bernie’s candidacy it was pointed out that his stance on guns was not in line with most liberals/progressives. So I set out to find out as much as I could about his gun votes. I didn’t always love what I found. Hated some of it. But I needed to see indication of an evolution from some of his early votes, and to get clarification on others (e.g., you can pack a gun on Amtrac — unloaded, separate from ammo, locked in a case, in a luggage car, not “on the train”) so I could feel comfortable with my vote.
Anyway, “Low Information Voter” as commonly used carries with it an indictment — we have no problem attributing that phrase to Trump supporters, who we would not find ourselves arguing are filled with intellectual curiosity. They don’t know, and for the most part they don’t want to know, and if you told them, they wouldn’t listen. Would it help if I told that Muslim cleric on NPR “Hey, Donald Trump hates you for your religion, why are you supporting him?” Not likely. He already knows, but says it’s an “act”. He’s made his calculation.
But on its face, the phrase really neutrally defines the state of politics in general. Aside from inane, ignorant rants about how “blacks don’t vote for Bernie because they don’t have computers!!!!!” (Come on guys, is this not the height of stupid?), we shouldn’t be so eager to dismiss the concept of “low information voting” in general.
Low information voting happens because:
We’re busy and bombarded with messaging
I know that I receive dozens of pieces of mail per week despite the fact that I’ve gotten with the 21st century and do virtually everything on line. I get literally dozens of emails per day, all calling attention to something or other that I’ve expressed interest in and want to know about, if I had the hours and the space to cram it all into my brain. At one point last year I spent quite some time looking through all of the e-newsletters and whatnot and unsubscribing (now what was that password again? Argh!) because it had become overwhelming; now it is reaching that point again. Every minute of the day is information, conflicting messages, and frankly, a lot of worthless bullshit I’d like to wash from my skull, like that “Real Housewives” of anything is not only actually a thing, but a franchise.
The Mainstream Media is Lame
Duh, right? We’ve been saying this for years now. A combination of laziness, bias, ignorance, and the transition from “news” to “infotainment” has only made it worse. If you read the NYT on one day and didn’t go back, you learned, erroneously, that Hillary Clinton was under investigation by the FBI. Only she isn’t. I’m sure a lot of intelligent people still think that, unfortunately. And again, there is so much of it, with so many points of view, what I wouldn’t give for someone like Walter Cronkite again, that the nation — right and left — trusted. But then that’s another problem, isn’t it? That with all the other messaging and all of the competing media, the average person is counting on someone else to tell them how to make sense of it all. And unfortunately they turn to someone like Limbaugh, in some cases. But not everyone has time to waste fact checking the person they’re relying on.
There is a blurring between experts and advocates
Others have written more eloquently and expansively on this, and it has sparked many a pie fight, but we need to be wary about the “experts” that are trotted before us to ‘help’ us understand the issues. From the ex-CIA guy who analyzed CIA issues for years despite never having been in the CIA, to economists and policy wonks who turn out to have a biased agenda (either to purposely mislead or just because of affiliation), most voters are somewhat at the mercy of the media that provides the menu and fall prey to misinformation and disinformation and sometimes frankly garbage in the guise of “expert analyses”. Is anyone else here skeeved out when anyone asks people like Dick Morris what they think . . . about anything? But they do.
There is an industry devoted to divining the best way to mislead us
We’re being misled. All of the time. From every direction. From food labeling to commercials to small print to spokesmodel images, we are being sold a bill of goods everywhere we turn. Back in the 60’s someone discovered the great idea of hiding images of naked women in the ice cubes in ads for alcoholic beverages to get men to buy them. It’s not new. And it’s worse when it comes to politics — find someone who hates the candidate, trot them out with a lie or smear, and voila, you have numbskulls wearing boo boo bandaids to ridicule a war hero and normally thoughtful people who work 12 hours a day with no time for news wondering if they’ve missed something heinous about the guy they’ve been considering voting for. How many people still think Al Gore said he invented the internet? I wrote a diary about this year’s fare, but again, this stuff isn’t new, and most people aren’t rushing to candidates’ websites and personal histories to verify what they’re hearing. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, true or not, and almost impossible to stamp out.
Candidates sometimes suck at getting their message out
This can be because of a mixed bag of things, and being an enthusiastic Bernie supporter it’s difficult to say this, but frankly, in the end it’s the candidate’s job to reach out. I think his campaign knows this, but if you’re not making inroads with a demographic, only so much blame goes to Rovian tactics and lack of media coverage and even censoring of twitter hashtags. The bulk of the blame goes on the candidate. Obama took a lot of shit from Clinton in 2008 and kicked her ass anyway. He was a transformational candidate with a compelling narrative, and that gave him a platform that helped him rise above, whereas Sanders has had the PTB setting up roadblocks at every turn, but Obama took a lot of hits that could have taken a lesser candidate down, and floated above it all while getting a few good kicks in himself. I don’t know that we’ll see very many candidates like Barack Obama, though.
Confirmation Bias
Basically, our minds subconsciously grasp onto information that confirms what we already believe, and reject information that calls it into question. We choose a candidate and anything negative must be bullshit and anything positive needs its very own Dkos diary. We watch the same video and come to opposite conclusions. That is human nature, something built in that to some extent we can’t really help. On the other hand, if one more person here tells me that Bernie Sanders thinks economic equality will magically fix racism, I’m going to . . . point out that I’ve linked to his fucking racial justice platform for the last time because that’s willful ignorance, and something we CAN help. We shouldn’t be afraid to look when confronted with information that might make us think twice about what we’ve been thinking was “true”. Confirmation bias is an excuse for passive receivers of information (i.e., most voters), but not for political junkies trying to make an argument on a site with other relatively well-informed political junkies. At least read the opposing candidate’s issues pages before casting aspersions on their policies. You might still think they’re full of shit but at least it’s a point of view backed by information.
I think most of us have experienced that feeling that if we just say the precise correct thing, if we point out this egregious thing or that statistic, surely the other person will come to see we're right. I've seen people spend their entire marriages looking for the right words to convince their spouses that they're wrong about some fundamental thing, like being more talkative, or that it's not okay to fart at the dinner table.
It's not that odd that people are doing that with regard to the primaries, and in some cases doing it in an awfully fumbling, ignorant and insulting way. “If only ‘they’ knew what I knew, they'd decide differently” comes off as really condescending no matter how it is intended.
But there IS such a thing as low information voting that isn’t an insult but more of a symptom of information overload and political detachment, and it’s our job as advocates to elucidate. The challenge is that one person’s “information” is another person’s unwelcome attack on something they value, or worse, an implication that they aren’t able to discern what’s best for themselves.
I don’t know how to navigate that fine line, to identify where it’s going to be helpful to offer insight versus where it will be considered ‘splaining’ and condescension. Even “sticking to the issues” hasn’t really worked. But I’m hoping everyone will step back from the precipice and ignore the idiots who call us stupid and uninformed and embrace those who seem to want to impart something valuable, and try to be forgiving when someone with good intentions steps in it, as we humans tend to do.
I ran into an acquaintance just now who is voting for Trump. “I like Bernie but he will raise our taxes to pay for free college and everyone will have guns”. Trump or Bernie, and he picks Trump. Sigh.
Low information voting as it is more commonly understood (as an epithet to indicate ignorance) IS real, it’s caused by human behavior, and it’s already having devastating effects: Trump is the frontrunner for the GOP nomination.