October 25, 2004, 7:49 a.m.
Don’t Know Much About Politics
The curse of the ignorant voter.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the November 8, 2004, issue of National Review.

The breathless coverage that greets every new poll tracking the candidates’ support delicately avoids the depressing reality of just whose opinion is being so scientifically sliced and diced. Despite the thousands of campaign ads and the oceans of spilled media ink over the past year, the ignorant voter outnumbers voters of all other stripes. That the public’s knowledge of current affairs is in a sorry state is the only safe call we can make about this year’s race.

“Most individual voters are abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information,” George Mason law professor Ilya Somin concludes in a recent paper for the Cato Institute. Somin recognizes that what’s well understood by political scientists is rarely acknowledged in political commentary. “The sheer depth of most individual voters’ ignorance is shocking to observers not familiar with the research,” he writes.

Although, as National Review readers, you can count yourselves among the 5 percent of voters who pay close attention to policy and politics. About 70 percent of Americans don’t know that Congress recently passed a Medicare prescription-drug plan — the largest federal-entitlement expansion in decades. Sixty-five percent don’t know that a ban on partial-birth abortion has been enacted, and almost 60 percent have heard either nothing (30 percent) or very little (28 percent) about the controversial Patriot Act. A majority is unable to estimate even roughly how many American troops have been killed in Iraq. More than 60 percent of the public doesn’t know that big increases in domestic spending have had a substantial impact on the deficit.

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