Why Trump Has a Huge Advantage With Low-Information Voters

Numerous news stories have reported on how Donald Trump's speeches at rallies and elsewhere are delivered on a 4th grade level of speech and vocabulary. For Trump, this is probably a good thing given the nature of his core base of support: non-college educated whites and evangelicals, the least educated of any Christian denominations in America. Add to this reality the fact that many of Trump's low information voters are easily engaged by racism and/or right wing Christian extremism and otherwise either pay little attention to the news media or rely on the propaganda of Fox News as their sole source of information, distorted as it may be. In short, Trump's tactics - and even his lies - work with his base. Democrats on the other hand have a different problem given the much more diverse nature of that party's base.  On the one hand you have highly educated individuals who follow politics daily (I confess to being a member of this group) and on the other, there are vast numbers of less educated/engaged Democrats, some of whom pay little attention to politics which they view as "confusing" or as not delivering to them.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at this issue and the challenge Democrat candidates have in motivating and energizing the party' low information.  I definitely feel for candidates that need to find a means to connect with this segment of the party base.Here are story excepts: 

A little over a week ago, after the Trump administration killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the opinion-havers of Twitter were doing what they do best: arguing about something most people don’t care about. The debate at hand involved Elizabeth Warren’s shifting public statements on Soleimani’s killing.. . . . After a whole day of Warren mockery on Twitter, Dave Weigel, a reporter from the Washington Post, threw a brushback pitch at two colleagues from the National Journal and ABC News. “Guys, get out of the beltway for a weekend. Most people had to google Soleimani on Friday,” he wrote.

Weigel, who has spent more time in airports over the last decade than most political journalists, was echoing a critique long held by Avis Preferred press corps against their desk jockey friends in Washington and New York: that the stories and micro-scandals that obsess political and media insiders—often played out in episodic fashion on Twitter—matter little to voters who are too busy and too well-adjusted to follow every nanosecond of the political news cycle. It’s hard to overstate how salient this discontinuity will be in the current election year.

Donald Trump, despite his deep personal insecurities and lust for elite validation—and, indeed, his own use of Twitter—has derived much of his political success by ignoring Washington finger-waggers and connecting with the more primal instincts of his supporters, in whatever televised or digital corner of the media he can, with or without the good graces of the national press and savvy insiders. . . . . . one of the biggest splits in American politics is simply between those who follow politics closely and those who do not.

It’s a split that maps, if not perfectly, onto the gap that emerged between college and non-college educated voters in 2016. The latter set are often low-information voters who view politicians and media with contempt, deciding to sit elections out. Trump has exploited them to powerful effect. [Trump]The president has made politics about culture—not just policy.

None of the above can be said for Democrats, who care habitually about the good graces of the national press, and who don’t see politics as a subspecies of the entertainment business. Democrats happen to believe in facts and institutions—and yes, they would like a cable contract when the campaign is over, thank you very much. But to Trump’s great advantage, the mainstream press is where many of the fights for the Democratic nomination are being waged: on cable news, on Twitter, and in the prestige media.

“In many ways, 2020 is the Cable News Primary. MSNBC and CNN are the biggest pipelines into voters’ living rooms.” The problem for Democrats is that those media spaces are, today more than ever, islands unto themselves. Cable may be a good way to reach highly engaged Democratic primary voters, but the reality is that television news is watched by only a tiny fraction of Americans. During the first five days of the much-hyped impeachment hearings, only about 4% of the American population tuned in to watch some part of the testimony on TV. Twitter, the other opinion-shaper preferred by Democrats, is younger, more educated, and more liberal than the country as a whole, and only 10% of its users create 80% of its content, according to Pew Research.

Topics like wine caves, pay-fors, court packing, white privilege, and Iowa’s role in the nomination process have become topics of profound consequence in the race. The political media blob tumbles forward every day on the assumption that people are aware of these story lines and characters, that voters are tuning in, when many probably can’t tell you what channel this thing is on. The assumption should be that they are not.

Even in Iowa, where caucusgoers have a front-row seat to the race and defeating Trump is top of mind for Democrats, the minutiae of Washington rarely pops up at campaign events. “It’s health care, prescription drug costs, teacher pay, climate change,” said Caroline Cummings, a political reporter for KGAN in Cedar Rapids. . . . Americans might be obsessed with Trump, but they really aren’t obsessed with politics.

Not since Barack Obama have Democrats had a figure compelling enough to overwhelm the informational divides in our culture, to appear on all screens at all times and capture the attention of people who don’t usually follow politics: black people, Hispanics, young people, low-income voters, and people who just think politics sucks. Democrats need them. But at this stage of the race—still early, yes—Democrats aren’t even close to grabbing the hearts and minds or even the eyeballs of the drop-off voters who stayed home on Election Day in 2016. In fact, it’s worse: Many of those voters can’t even tell you who is actually running for president. This doesn’t mean voters are dumb. It means they’re normal—and that Democrats have serious work to do to reach them.

In each of the three low-information groups, Favreau asked voters to say the first word that came to mind when he said “Democratic Party.” Almost everyone repeated a handful of the same names—Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, and __Bill Clinton __—along with known Republican Condoleezza Rice for some reason . . . . Most of the voters said they were generally aligned with the Democratic Party on issues—especially the idea of reducing health care costs and expanding access—but that they also associated the Democratic Party with infighting, taxes, socialism, ineptitude, and “too many candidates.” Only Obama’s name elicited warm reactions among everyone.

But even as they universally expressed displeasure with Trump, including the people who voted for him in Milwaukee but flipped in 2018, almost every participant told Favreau they wouldn’t yet commit to voting for the Democratic nominee in 2020. Some said it depends on who the nominee is. Others were open to voting for a third-party candidate instead of the Democrat. “None of them really like Trump, but they don’t have much love for Democratic politicians, Republican politicians, and especially the media, which they don’t trust at all,” Favreau said.

A theme that surfaced again and again, not just about Democrats but about politics generally, was that the whole process is confusing, tedious, and off-putting—and that news organizations and social media do little to make sense of it. “I don’t understand it. I haven’t even watched the news. I just turn it off and go do something else,” said Angela from Philadelphia, a Medicaid-dependent mother of an autistic child who said she was raised Democrat but no longer follows elections closely, despite voting in 2018.

In Philadelphia the voters associated Biden with “crime bill,” “too old,” and “not fired up.” . . . . Sanders, too, was described as “too old” in all three cities, though many of the responses were, if not on message, at least message-adjacent. The Miami group associated Sanders with “crazy hair,” “grinny,” “free college,” and “wants to give away too many things for free.” The Philadelphia group said “your crazy uncle,” “health care,” “questionable health,” and “passionate hand talker.”

Focus groups are not polls, but they do add important texture to the horse race and pressure-test assumptions embedded in the national conversation. The Wilderness focus groups offer a glimpse into the behavior and opinions of those voters you don’t often read about, the self-identified Democrats who “don’t know enough” or have “no opinion” about the candidates. If you scrolled through excited corners of progressive Twitter last week, for instance, you’d think that Julián Castro’s endorsement of Warren was a major moment, giving her a stamp of approval from a former Obama administration official and the lone Hispanic figure in the 2020 race. But an Economist–YouGov poll from December showed that fully 35% of Democrats, and 39% of Hispanics, didn’t even know who Castro was. Another national Quinnipiac poll from December showed that 36% of Democrats didn’t know enough about Buttigieg to have an opinion, and a whopping 49% of Democrats didn’t know enough about Klobuchar. These are names on the tip of every political reporter’s tongue, the marquee actors in America’s national pageant, yet vast swaths of Democrats haven’t given them a passing thought.

[T]he views of these lesser-engaged Democrats are complex and don’t fall neatly into the ideological buckets often discussed in the media. They mostly liked the idea of Medicare for All, but also doubted how the government could possibly pay for it. They brought up a wide variety of issues as their top concerns—poverty, opioids, prison reform, Medicaid, college affordability, guns, LGBTQ rights, drug prices, taxes—but few could say what the federal government had done to help. “No one could remember the last thing the government had actually done to improve their lives, except one woman in Miami who brought up the Affordable Care Act,” Favreau said.

[F]or many of the people in Favreau’s focus groups, politics isn’t real life, either. The eventual Democratic nominee, he said, is duty-bound to fix that. He pointed to an interview with former Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, also airing on this season of The Wilderness: “What I think we all have to hold to, is that our ambitions have to be met with our capacity to deliver,” Abrams told him. “Because for the people who are the most easily dissuaded from participation, it’s when you promise them the moon and can‘t deliver a single grain of sand.”