NPR just reported that some new poll says Republican voters are more enthusiastic than we are.
Can this possibly be true? Democracy itself is at stake, after all.
I do believe reports that a lot voters are willing to pull the lever for Republican candidates, no matter how extreme, simply because they’re the alternative to Joe Biden. But I don’t believe for a minute that they do so out of enthusiasm. They’re fools. They imagine somehow that putting people in office who want to make the country ungovernable will make the price of gasoline go down.
Low information voters are democracy’s Achilles heel. They will as easily vote for mass suicide as choose Coke over Pepsi at the supermarket. And low information voters are the creation of the media, which prefer to feed them a comforting illusion and keep them tuned in rather than tell them an inconvenient truth that might make them tune out.
I’m part of the problem. I’m part owner of a group of radio stations in rural New England. I’ve got a competing radio station group breathing down my neck, and advertisers spending money on Facebook and Google instead of buying radio ads. It’s all we can do to keep the bills paid and the doors open. We have to play the hits to keep people tuned in. Local newspapers have mostly succumbed; the ones that survive in our area have changed from dailies to weeklies. We’re the last ones standing as far as local media go. We have to tell people what they want to hear, if we want them to stay tuned. And that doesn’t make me happy at all.
I want to run an editorial basically telling people not to believe what they hear on the radio. I suspect that won’t go over very well.
Just six more days now.