charley
Registered
... if the shoe fits
Bloomberg Politics reported back in August, Hillary Clinton was enjoying a giant 25 percentage-point lead among college-educated voters going into the election. In contrast, in the 2012 election, college-educated voters just barely favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Never have educated voters so uniformly rejected a candidate. But never before have the lesser-educated so uniformly supported a candidate. Trump supporters might retort: That's because Trump supports the little guy and Clinton helps the already privileged college grads. But that's false: Trump supporters in the primaries had an average income of about $72,000 per year. They aren't rich, but make more than the national average and more than Clinton supporters.Trump owes his victory to the uninformed. But it's not just Trump. Political scientists have been studying what voters know and how they think for well over 65 years. The results are frightening. Voters generally know who the president is but not much else. They don't know which party controls Congress, what Congress has done recently, whether the economy is getting better or worse (or by how much). In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, most voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than George W. Bush, but significantly less than half knew that Gore was more supportive of abortion rights, more supportive of welfare-state programs, favored a higher degree of aid to blacks, or was more supportive of environmental regulation.Just why voters know so little is well-understood. It's not that people are stupid. Rather, it?s that democracy creates bad incentives..
Trump supporters might be upset to learn that they are not well read, and reveals that high-information voters (regardless of their income, race, employment status, gender, or where they live) tend to favor free trade and are pro-immigration. It's not just that Trump?s anti-trade and anti-immigrant agenda flies against the consensus of economists on the left, right, and center, but it?s precisely the platform informed voters reject regardless of their backgrounds..
That?s not to say that high-information voters tend to favor the Democrats politics. In fact, high-information voters tend to have policy preferences that cut across party lines. For instance, high-information voters are pro-free trade, pro-immigration, in favor of criminal justice reform, wish to raise taxes to offset the deficit, anti-war, pro-gay rights, and skeptical that the welfare state can solve all our problems.
... point being, people that are informed & intelligent tend to not vote for bigots, misogynistic & racist politicians.....
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