Trump Supporters Appear To Be Misinformed, Not Uninformed

Dang, I couldn't have said it better! LOL. I am just really sick and tired of people trying to convince me that I am either uninformed or misinformed, and then trying to tell me how things are when I can see it with my own eyes and am perfectly capable of making my own assessment. I am also sick and tired of people who play the blame game, most of whom are to blame themselves for whatever ails them because nobody ever taught them the value of owning-up to your own shortcomings and fixing them. I am also sick and tired of people who do really stupid things, such as the Muslim woman at the Trump rally in Vermont the other night, who damn well knows why she is there and what could happen when several thousand people who do not think the way she does finds out what she is up to. She couldn't possibly expect anything other than what happened to her, and she wasn't tossed because she was a Muslim...it was because she was protesting and disrupting the rally. Go to a Sanders rally with a "Make America Great Again" sign, shirt, and cap, or better yet show up to a Clinton rally wearing a "Hillary For Prison" shirt, and see how long you last before people are jeering at you and leading you out of the venue. Too much is being made out of very little, and we have to play the race card while we are at it. Everyone is so butthurt these days it is disgusting.

Cpl Jeff N. - Corporal; Although I could be wrong, it appears that you stopped reading before you hit the "Because an informed citizenry is believed to be an essential element to a functioning democracy, political scientists have long been interested in what Americans know about politics. For the most part, scholars have found that many U.S. citizens don’t have basic information about politics and don’t hold consistent opinions on policy matters. More recently, scholarly interest has turned to a more nuanced understanding of what being politically informed means." bit [Paragraph 3].

The studies were not conducted using questions LIKE "Do you agree with me that Socialism is a good thing?" but rather using questions LIKE "Was WWII fought between the US and Germany against Russia?".

Possibly, if you actually read Kuklinsky's study [ http://igpa.uillinois.edu/system/files/Misinformation.pdf ] you might get a better understanding of what they were actually studying. On the other hand, Nayhan & Reifler's study [ https://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf ] would indicate that reading Kyklinsky's study won't change your opinion.

PS - I really dislike links to PDFs because they almost always look like gibberish in the "link box".

COL Ted Mc . I read the entire article. Do you think it is possible voters of all eras were generally not well informed? Do you think the voters of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were some bastions of well informed voters? I think not.

This is simply more of the high browed looking down upon the unwashed masses (as they view them) and dismissing them as uninformed or misinformed since they do not reach the same conclusions as them.

One needn't know the combatants in WWII (to use your example) to have an opinion on abortion or immigration or ISIS. If you went to a Hillary rally you would see the same levels of "misinformed/uninformed voters. There are plenty of "intellectuals" with sets of facts on both sides of any issue you take up. The study you posted uses welfare to illustrate point. Just because someone doesn't know every factual point about how much we spend, what the average payout is etc does not mean they cannot be against the concept of "welfare" or increasing it or decreasing it.

Just as I do not need to know every nuance and factual data about size, beliefs, structure etc about ISIS to know that I do not care for them and think they need to be eradicated. We cannot all be experts on everything. We can listen to experts on both sides of an issue and reach our own conclusion.

I would agree with the writers that the average American is not well informed on many issues but that is not due to the absence of factual information. Facts, though are not the only thing we use to reach conclusion on any given issue. They are an input but not the only one.

We live in the information age. We all have access to more factual information, opinion, studies than at any time in the history of the world. We chose to play candy crush with the technology.

Here here! And not only are the media a bunch of lying sum-bit****, so are most of the politicians. And what really has ALL of them in a screaming tizzy, both the media and the elitepols, is that the vast majority of everything Trump has had to say can be supported factually, and that which was stated beforehand actually came to pass. It's a new hour and a new day, and people are becoming quite weary of the same ole way. Heh...that rhymed! I'm a poet and didn't know it...but my feet show it because they are long fellers.