How do you define ignorance? Lack of knowledge or information is the common definition. Perhaps that lack of knowledge is due to how our campaigns are runs. Both parties spend billions on political advertising which consist of mostly personal attacks. Neither uses their billions to inform, just to paint their opponent as the worst scumbag on the face of the earth if not in the universe. There’s no attempt to educate or provide useful information to the voter. Most folks completely tune out all these political ads anyway. I did, leading up to the Georgia senate runoff’s I turned off the TV in December and didn’t turn it back on again until after the senate runoff election was over.
What I found interesting, according to CNN’s exit polls was 73% of those who voted had made up their minds who they were going to vote for by the end of August. That’s right after the two conventions. I take most of those 73% were the base of both parties with some independents who lean toward one party or the other. Then the personal attack ads begin trying to persuade the remaining 27% to vote for your candidate. I’d say most of that 27% were independents who hadn’t up to now paid any attention to politics or even government policy until now. So yes, ignorance does apply.
Then by election day, all they have to go on is who to chose to vote for, scumbag A or scumbag B. Both major parties try to get these folks to hate the other guy, the other party more than they hate you and yours. No attempt to inform or educate, just personal attack ads piled on personal attack ads. The crazy thing is we’re trying to do more and more to get more and more of these inattentive, very low information people to vote.
You’re correct, Trump lost to Biden because of his obnoxious personality, his rude and uncouth behavior as president. Not for the many reasons you stated. Trump lost because more people disliked him as a person than disliked Biden as a person. The same can be said of 2016, Where Hillary was more disliked as a person than Trump was. It wasn’t policy or stances on issues, it wasn’t what each might bring to the office of the presidency. 2016 was decided among independents who are the low information voters who only begin to pay attention to politics and the candidates a month or two prior to an election.
These folks will tune out, the 1-6 hearings will fall on deaf ears as they’re not interested in that. They’re interested in the upcoming NFL playoffs, March madness and other things, favorite TV shows, and things like that than politics. Politics to them doesn’t begin until a month or two prior to an election. What happened in politics prior to that, for the 22 or 23 months in-between elections might as well have taken place in the 18th century. I don’t see that changing. The only thing that changed is the higher percentage of the voting electorate today are independents, casual observers to politics than in the past. Independents made up around 20% of the electorate in the 1950’s, rose to 30% in the 1980’s and climbed to 40% over the last 15 years. More and more uninformed deciding elections than ever before.
