USA Today: “Some folks accuse these conservative thought leaders of being hypocrites, authoritarians and racists, whose real intent is to discourage voting by groups who generally vote for Democrats – for instance, Black people and other traditionally marginalized communities. I say, such accusations are unfair! These edgy conservative thought leaders would (no doubt) agree that ignorant and civically illiterate Republican supporters shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”
“For example: According to a Reuters poll, 6 in 10 Republicans believe former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election (although he lost by over 7 million votes); and about half of GOP voters believe the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was a left-wing ‘false flag’ operation and/or a ‘peaceful protest’ (although about 140 law enforcement officers were injured, one was killed and two died by suicide). Even more shocking, a poll conducted by the Survey Center on American Life showed that nearly 3 in 10 Republicans believe the QAnon fantasy (for instance, ‘Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites’). As recently as December 2017, 51% of Republicans in a YouGov survey said they thought former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya – despite ample evidence that he was born in the United States and exactly zero evidence that he was born anywhere else. The level of civic illiteracy and ignorance among Republican voters regarding COVID-19 is also disturbing. For example, in a poll analysis from Brookings in early September, 41% of Republicans believed the flu (about 22,000 deaths each year) or automobile accidents (more than 32,000 deaths per year) caused more deaths than COVID-19 (which killed about 375,000 Americans in 2020). That is impressively out of touch with reality.”
“If citizens take so little interest in America’s civic affairs that they believe this sort of nonsense, I’m sure Andrew McCarthy and company would agree they qualify as nonvirtuous, low-quality, ‘ignorant, civics-illiterate people’ – and we’d all be better off if they didn’t vote.”