Saturday, December 29, 2012

Low-Information Voter = Stupid?

by ICB
The term “Low-Information Voter” has been getting around a lot lately. I first heard the term used by Rush Limbaugh on his radio program discussing President Obama being named Time Magazine’s man of the year.

Rush said, “So this guy’s Man of the Year because idiots love him? Because believe me, if they think low-information voters are idiots, I guarantee you they’ll be glad to take their votes. The new stupid America? That should have been Man of the Year, Person of the Year: Stupid people, the low-information voter.”

My question is, is the Low-Information Voter really stupid or do they just not care enough to follow daily politics?

The easy answer is they are stupid. They are as Rush would say, Uneducated, careless, self-absorbed, pot smoking, long haired, maggot infested, FM types. But, I’m not sure the easy answer is the correct one.

It’s a litter harder to explain Low-Information voters who just might be hard working, educated, productive Americans who choose NOT to pay attention to daily politics but vote on Election Day, on a single issue they care about.

An example might be Sandra Fluke, the former Georgetown University law student who was at the center of the debate over whether women should receive free contraception paid for by taxpayers. I don’t think Fluke is a stupid person. She must have some brains to be a law student (Although I don’t know what kind of grades she got.) I think she is a single issue voter. Instead of researching both parties on a variety of issues and choosing the one closest to her point of view she picks the party who supports the one issue she is passionate about. Would she qualify as a Low-Information Voter? Probably, since she only cares about one issue. That is assuming a High-Information follows politics daily and researches multiple issues before casting a vote.

The problem for Republicans is that today’s Democratic Party is filled with single issue voters. Union members, environmental activists, feminists, homosexuals rallying for same sex marriages, anti-war, anti-military activists, staunch liberal/socialists and on and on. If you put all these single issue voters together into one voting bloc, Democrats are hard to beat on the national stage. Low-Information Voters they probably are, but stupid? I’m not convinced. I might even go as far as to say the Democratic Party has smartly and effectively been able to get all these single issue voters into their party and launch Obama into a second term. I would rather the Low-Information Voter be a High-Information Voter but there will always be single issue voters.

Comments are invited!
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2 comments:

Watch Dog said...

The Liberal Super-PAC propaganda machines (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) make certain that as many voters as possible remain uninformed.

Exit polls indicated that over 80% of the voters had never heard about the ambassador to Libya being murdered while the White House sat on their gutless asses.

An even larger group knew nothing about the cover-up!

So based on that we can say that the voters were:
- duped!
- miss informed!
- lied to!
- ignorant!

Does that make the stupid?

Not necessarily, but you have to wonder how gullible do you have to be to be oblivious to all the signs that something is not right with what you are being told?

How dumb must you be to believe that spending trillions of dollars on new debt will solve over spending?

How stupid do you have to be to not understand that when you have to borrow 40+% of every dollar that you spend means that you ARE BANKRUPT?

What kind of warped, immoral mind do you have to have to believe that you are entitled to someone else’s money?

I’ll go with stupid and immoral!!

Mike said...

Amen to the WatchDog!