Uninformed Voters Quotes

Political scientists followed up on Todorov’s initial research by identifying a category of voters for whom the automatic preferences of System 1 are particularly likely to play a large role. They found what they were looking for among politically uninformed voters who watch a great deal of television. As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television. Evidently,

Political scientists followed up on Todorov’s initial research by identifying a category of voters for whom the automatic preferences of System 1 are particularly likely to play a large role. They found what they were looking for among politically uninformed voters who watch a great deal of television. As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television.

Upton Sinclair said ‘it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when he’s being paid not to understand it’ [paraphrase] that’s simply a truism of human nature. And part of the problem is us. There is to some degree, unaccountable power in the United States because America has one of the lowest voter participation rates among the western democracies. For whatever reason, people have become apathetic, uninformed and cynical. They don’t participate because they think there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties. And what’s going to rush into the vacuum? It’s going to be power, money and influence centers who would benefit from everybody just going to sleep.” Mike Lofgren, March 15, 2017 on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane

Democracy, as practiced in the United States in the early twenty-first century, has become a resentful, angry business. The fragile egos of narcissistic college students jostle against the outraged, wounded self-identity of talk-radio addicts, all of whom demand to be taken with equal seriousness by everyone else, regardless of how extreme or uninformed their views are. Experts are derided as elitists, one of many groups putatively oppressing “we the people,” a term now used by voters indiscriminately and mostly to mean “me.

Instead of voting for the person they like best, they vote for the one they think they have to vote for so the other one doesn't win. The reason an otherwise good candidate has 'no chance' is because the media decided ahead of time they had no chance, and the uninformed, apathetic voters go along with it!