America is embarrassing.

I don't see that that's a dog whistle, I think it's just literally correct. Every single one of us are bombarded with propaganda on a daily basis, and people who look no further into the situation take that propaganda at face value. Historically and statistically speaking, these people who look no further into the situation and take their news at face value are likely to vote Republican. Educated people, and politically informed people are more likely to vote Democrat, or try and get involved with a third party. This isn't dog-whistling or racism or anything, it's just mathematically consistent over the history of the two-party political system.

This flips on its head when you're dealing with the rich however, because the rich are often educated but also vote republican. That's not because they don't know better (though sometimes I do wonder), that's because they cut backroom deals. A republican will fuck over an average person to death in order to curry favor with a rich man every time, and the rich know it, so why would they vote for anyone else?

The trick just comes in convincing anyone else other than themselves to also vote Republican, and that's where the lies and propaganda come in. It is difficult to lie to someone who is paying attention to their surroundings and notice that your words don't match reality. It is much easier to lie to someone who listens to your words, immediately takes them as fact and then never investigates any further. These people are the low-information voters that are being discussed. These are the people that assume something must be true because someone said it on the TV, and you aren't allowed to lie on TV right? These are the people that assume Trump is the victim of a political witch hunt based on no evidence beyond the fact that he said so. These are the people that vehemently believe that trans kids are demanding cat-style litterboxes in school because Joe Rogan said it happened once. These are the people that honestly believe their son is going to be tied up in the school bathroom and have his genitals traumatically removed by his geography teacher, and that this somehow is not going to be considered a federal crime and is an action supported by the school.

A low information voter gets lied to directly to their face and never seeks the truth. These people exist and are numerous, and they vote.

Now there also exist single issue voters, people that may better understand that they're being lied to but still wedge on the single issue of "I absolutely cannot abide a woman being allowed to survive a bad pregnancy" or similar. To which I say, you're fucking stupid, but hopefully you at least know that you're fucking stupid so instead of pitying you I just hate you. The low information voter might be a dumbass, but the single issue voter very often actively elects to damage endangered and marginalized people, especially in service of religion. I have no respect for the low-information voter but I have almost negative respect for the avergae single issue voter. They do know better, they just choose not to compromise and people die because of it.

An objective view of reality is incredibly hard to uncover in the Misinformation Age unless you spend an awful lot of time and effort doing so. I'm fully confident that I am equally as ignorant about some things as these "low information voters" are, and I only partially blame them for it, really. It's not their fault that none of us can trust the news anymore. But when you get told something outlandish, like "the teachers are force-transing the kids!" you could at least pretend to try to see if that's ever happened before, anywhere, before attaching it as a core part of your personality.

I think I'm rambling now. But my point being, the low information voter is real. They exist, and they scare the ass off of me because they're numerous and they also get to vote. I don't exactly think it's their own fault that they exist, because in a sane world we would have media protections that prevent this sort of story from reaching anyone in the first place. But every person is capable of looking up from their phone once in a while and just observing the world around them and seeing if it matches what they've been told. People who don't do that are easily swayed and are a powerful tool in the political arsenal, and they're classically considered to be Republican voters because the R's have a long and storied history of lying their ass off right to your face, because they think you're a useful idiot, and sometimes they're right.

Democrats lie too, but they usually seem like they feel some sort of shame about it, and they try to keep their lies believable because many of their voters have a college degree and any amount of perception and analytical ability. Republican lies will tell you the stupidest and most outlandish shit you've ever heard anyone say six times in five minutes, and just gish gallop right past every one of them. It's a firehose of bullshit, and some people drown in it instead of taking two steps to the left and getting out of the stream of shit.

Well, there's the other interpretation, that they're just stupid as shit. There's no way an informed, educated, rational, and at least semi-kind person votes for Trump. If you did, you failed on one or more of those points. Personally, I prefer to think they're (largely) mislead, not dumb. It's easy to be fooled by the propaganda machine of the Epstein class.

TIL

Decisions based on low information are like studies with small sample sizes: the results will fluctuate more due to random noise.

I will not put it past this administration to do so

Used Unwall to copy/paste the contents just so it's a bit easier to read.

In 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters. A Data for Progress poll released just before the election found Americans who didn’t consume any news at all said they’d vote for Trump over Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin, 60% to 40%.

In February, we reported that many of these voters had soured on Trump. Voters who couldn’t name the party in control of Congress moved away from Trump at about twice the rate as high-information voters. But approval isn’t vote choice. With the midterms less than two weeks away, it is worth asking if these voters are turning against the president’s party in federal elections, too.

In our October Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, conducted Oct. 13–19 among 2,028 U.S. adults, we asked respondents two factual questions about politics: which party has the most members in the House, and which has the most members in the Senate. I classified anyone who got at least one of these questions wrong as “low-knowledge.” About 30% of adults miss at least one question, including 25% of 2024 Trump voters, 22% of Harris voters, and more than half of people who didn’t vote in 2024.

In this article, I do two things with this data. First, I repeat my February analysis and compare how these two groups feel about Trump’s job as president; then I look at each group’s voting behavior in the upcoming House midterms. Register for free to read the rest of this piece.

In 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters. A Data for Progress poll released just before the election found Americans who didn’t consume any news at all said they’d vote for Trump over Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin, 60% to 40%.

In February, we reported that many of these voters had soured on Trump. Voters who couldn’t name the party in control of Congress moved away from Trump at about twice the rate as high-information voters.

But approval isn’t vote choice. With the midterms less than two weeks away, it is worth asking if these voters are turning against the president’s party in federal elections, too.

In our October Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, conducted Oct. 13–19 among 2,028 U.S. adults, we asked respondents two factual questions about politics: which party has the most members in the House, and which has the most members in the Senate. I classified anyone who got at least one of these questions wrong as “low-knowledge.” About 30% of adults miss at least one question, including 25% of 2024 Trump voters, 22% of Harris voters, and more than half of people who didn’t vote in 2024.

In this article, I do two things with this data. First, I repeat my February analysis and compare how these two groups feel about Trump’s job as president; then I look at each group’s voting behavior in the upcoming House midterms.

First, the approval rating comparison. My findings from February hold. Low-knowledge 2024 voters say they backed Trump by 8 points, according to our poll. Today they give him a net job approval of −27, a 35-point shift. Compare that to Trump’s approval rating among voters who got both questions right: These voters backed Harris by 1 point and now give Trump a net −24 approval, a 23-point shift. Low-information voters have moved against Trump at a higher rate than high-information voters, by 12 points. The size of this shift is unlikely to be explained by statistical noise.

When compared to our plot from February (below), you can see that low-information voters have actually overtaken high-information voters in their anti-Trump-ness.

The 12-point gap in movement among the groups is identical across these surveys. This gap shows up in vote intention for Congress, too.

The less Trump voters know, the more they cross over First, consider a similar chart to the one above. This shows each group’s change from recalled Trump margin in 2024 to Democratic margin on the generic ballot here in 2026:

Low-knowledge 2024 voters backed Trump by 8 points. Today they favor Democrats for the House by 12, a 19-point swing (using unrounded figures). Voters who got both questions right backed Harris by 1 point and now favor Democrats by 7, a 7-point swing. That means low-information voters have swung toward Democrats almost three times as far as high-information voters. As with approval, the gap is too big to chalk up to statistical noise.

Among self-described 2024 Trump voters, 18% of those who missed a question on our mini-quiz plan to vote for the Democrat in their House race, vs 6% of those who got both right. If you ignore people who say they are not sure how they’ll vote or that they won’t participate at all, Democrats win 21% of low-knowledge Trump voters and 6% of high-knowledge ones.

Voters who got both knowledge questions wrong are even less GOP-leaning. They break 55% for Republican congressional candidates, 30% for Democrats, and 15% are not sure how/if they’ll vote.

Why low-information voters have moved away from Trump Low-knowledge Trump voters give him lower net approval than high-knowledge Trump voters on every one of the 13 issues we track in our poll. On prices, they disapprove of his handling by 24 points, while high-knowledge Trump voters approve by 4. It’s the only issue where low-knowledge Trump voters are net negative.

But even on Trump’s signature issues, low-knowledge supporters are far cooler toward him. Their net approval of his handling of immigration is +34, vs +74 among high-knowledge Trump voters. On border security, it’s +46 vs +81, and on deportations +33 vs +72. The pattern holds for AI, health care, foreign policy, and more. Low-information Trump voters show a largely uniform shift away from him:

Their attachment to the GOP is thin, too. Only 35% of low-knowledge Trump voters say the Republican Party cares more about people like them, vs 69% of high-knowledge Trump voters. And this may even be coloring the group’s recollection of past voting trends: when we asked respondents this month who they voted for in 2024, 8% of low-knowledge 2024 Trump voters said they actually voted for Harris (instead of the Trump vote they recorded in their past surveys for Verasight), vs 1.5% of high-knowledge Trump voters.

As a final consideration, the plot below shows rankings of respondents’ most important problems for the high- and low-information Trump voters. Low-info voters care more about prices than high-info voters:

Finally, here’s what this means for the midterms and beyond.

Elasticity is a threat to all majorities. Parties must provide durable, positive change or they’ll be tossed out. Perhaps the patterns covered in this piece are a result of anti-incumbency bias, or maybe it’s just simple elasticity among low-engagement voters.

It is well documented in political science that the least-informed voters are the most likely to switch parties from one presidential election to the next. People with more political information have the partisan filters to resist news that cuts against their side, so their views stay put. They see politics through the lens of highly calibrated ideological labels and partisan filter bubbles, cognitive heuristics that are often unavailable to voters with less information about politics. But people with less political knowledge can have their views shaped by broader economic and political conditions.

There is strong evidence for the elastic/reactive vote theory in this polling. As I’ve written before, low-knowledge voters didn’t back Trump in 2024 because they bought into MAGA. They backed him because prices were high and Democrats were in charge. Prices are still high, so it stands to reason that since Republicans are now in charge, the low-information group would move left — regardless of who they voted for last time.

In 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics helped put Trump back in the White House. This year, the relationship between political knowledge and party vote has inverted; the lowest-information Americans lean more Democratic than voters who know the most about politics. As I’ve shown with other polling, I think the simplest explanation here is that group was frustrated with high costs in 2024, decided to sample Trump as a potential fix, and now solidly regret that choice.

If the polls are right, in just ten days, Democrats will be swept into power in the House and may even capture the Senate. If they do control Congress, it will be due to gains they’ve made with these elastic, reactive, largely apolitical low-information voters. They should be careful not to misunderstand what this victory would stem from: frustration at the incumbent and a demand for change.

If Democrats can’t deliver in 2026 — and especially after 2028, when Democrats will have a shot to win the presidency and therefore be unconstrained by President Trump’s veto power — it’s likely these voters will just swing back to the right again.

I apologize, i forgot how it worked. Give me time and I got you