2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: I keep asking myself, why do some people vote against their own interests! [View all]andym
(5,443 posts)and ignorant enough to fall for a liar and a cheat. Take a look at this blog
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/10/the-dance-of-the-dunces-trump-clinton-election-republican-democrat/
"OK, so that just happened. Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated, low-information white people. As Bloomberg Politics reported back in August, Hillary Clinton was enjoying a giant 25 percentage-point lead among college-educated voters going into the election. (Whether that trend held up remains to be seen.) In contrast, in the 2012 election, college-educated voters just barely favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Last night we saw something historic: the dance of the dunces. 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: Thats because Trump supports the little guy and Clinton helps the already privileged college grads. But thats false: Trump supporters in the primaries had an average income of about $72,000 per year. They arent rich, but make more than the national average and more than Clinton supporters.
Trump owes his victory to the uninformed. But its 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 dont 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. Its not that people are stupid. Rather, its that democracy creates bad incentives."