Don’t Know Much About Politics

The breathless coverage that greets every new poll tracking the candidates’ support delicately avoids the depressing reality of just whose opinion is being so scientifically sliced and diced. Despite the thousands of campaign ads and the oceans of spilled media ink over the past year, the ignorant voter outnumbers voters of all other stripes. That the public’s knowledge of current affairs is in a sorry state is the only safe call we can make about this year’s race.

“Most individual voters are abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information,” George Mason law professor Ilya Somin concludes in a recent paper for the Cato Institute. Somin recognizes that what’s well understood by political scientists is rarely acknowledged in political commentary. “The sheer depth of most individual voters’ ignorance is shocking to observers not familiar with the research,” he writes.