Low information voters aren’t bad people for the most part. They’re by and large good Americans who work or study too hard to stay on top of all this shit political junkies like us and our readers obsess over day in and day out. They’re still frustrating as hell. If you’re a liberal you’ve no doubt spent much of the last six years ripping your hair out hearing dumb shit like “Didn’t Hunter Biden take lots of money from some bad guys in Japan or something?” from the mouths of the uninformed.
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For most of the last two years there was this ever-present fear that the Republican Party and their MAGA media universe would capitalize on real inflation plus fake culture war grievances to crush the Democrats in the midterms with a 2010-style Red Wave, taking 60+ seats in the House and sweeping all of the swing state Senate, governor, attorney general, and secretary of state races. The warning signs were certainly there, despite signs of momentum for Dems over the summer.
October 2022 was quite a nail biter for Dems. But probably the deeper nadir was November 2021, when the true momentum really was with the Republicans. Biden was reeling from the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, inflation was surging, and smarmy plutocrat Glenn Youngkin defeated Clinton acolyte Terry McCauliffe in the Virginia governor’s race riding the “Critical Race Theory” craze. Dems were rightfully freaking the hell out as a harbinger of disaster in 2022, and furious that Republicans had essentially just made shit up to scare voters into their column.
But what if the “Critical Race Theory” scam was just the MAGA icing on a real cake of legitimate frustration with school closures on the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic? It was by then the third school year in a row of disruptions to young lives caused by closures and masking, shit that had a severe impact on families. People were fed up and wanted to take it out on Democrats, right or wrong. “We’re going to fix our schools” was the message spoken. Regular folks heard “We’ll stop closing entire schools every time a kid gets the sniffles” while the MAGA scumbags heard “WE’RE BANNING WHITE GUILT FROM THE CLASSROOM! FUCK YEAH!”
Sure, liberals were frustrated as hell, and rightfully so because the “Critical Race Theory” bullshit was louder and more salient. They knew it was lie and the Fox News-Breitbart assholes pushing it knew it too. It was textbook lib-owning (maybe pun intended there). In a way the 2021 mini-Red Wave in Virginia was kind of an echo of the 2016 election – Hillary Clinton’s real flaws as a candidate and lack of appeal to regular low-info voters were obfuscated by the headline shit about her “corruption” and her emails. Insulting lies and hatred getting all the attention while the real problems for Democrats were lurking more quietly in the background.
You could argue the same for Democrats. Palmer Report and Raw Story obsessively hyped every minute development in the Mueller Investigation in 2018, like “OMG! Judge rejects Manafort motion to suppress evidence seized from condo!” while regular low-info voters were mostly concerned about Trump and Republicans trying to destroy the healthcare system. It’s not like portraying Trump as a corrupt autocrat didn’t help. It probably did. But the main concerns driving the bulk of independent voters to the polls for Dems were healthcare and economic issues.
FBI Agent Timothy Thibault tried to shut down an avenue of the Hunter Biden investigation.
Then, Twitter hires former FBI General Counsel James Baker who helps give the company an excuse to suppress the story.
Coordination?
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 6, 2022
With that in mind, you really have to step back and ask who the fuck this tweet is supposed to appeal to. Seriously. If you showed it to a focus group of 100 randomly selected voters, how many of them who aren’t already deeply committed MAGA Republicans or high-info libs would do anything other than shrug their shoulders and be like “Okay… So… Wait, does the government own Twitter or something? I thought the Tesla guy owns it now. He bought it, right?”
Again, it does go both ways. There are certainly plenty of stories on this site about shit of questionable at best relevance to the day to day lives of lower info voters and filled with inscrutable references to people, places, and things obscure to the public at large. But we would at least like to think that they’re relatable enough to those not engrossed in politics, that such people would be able to find something we wrote funny, interesting, or insightful for want of only a little bit more background information explained to them. If not, then fuck it. We’re not actually in this to change any hearts and minds. We’re here to inform and entertain those already on our side. It’s a big market in which there’s plenty of room to grow. And beyond that too. Today’s Dem-friendly uninformed voter is tomorrow’s hardcore National Zero reader.
And here we have Rick Scott saying Americans have to get madder about what happened at Twitter in the lead up to the 2020 election like anyone who doesn’t already follow this kind of shit cares.
We have Trump saying “the citizens of our country have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through, and the total effect of the suffering is just starting to take hold. They don’t quite feel it yet, but they will very soon. I have no doubt that by 2024, it will sadly be much worse and they will see much more clearly what happened and what is happening to our country, and the voting will be much different,” in his campaign launch speech, edging so perilously close to just saying outright that “We are so fucked because American voters are idiots.”
We have gremlin-faced PJ Media dipshit Stephen Kruiser saying almost that exactly the day after the midterms (minus the f-word, lol). We have “American Greatness” calling America a “Third World Electorate.” We have MAGA assholes wanting to raise the voting age because Gen Z so libtarded.
What we don’t have in front of us is any influential-enough Republican voices saying “You know maybe winnable voters outside of our base don’t actually care about fucking drag queen story hours and whatever happened at Twitter before Elon Musk bought it and all sorts of other stupid bullshit.”
The most inviolable law of American political physics is you either find the message that gets you to 50% plus one vote against your opponent or you lose. It’s a single sentence with a Bible-length book of variables on campaign fundraising, voter suppression, handling the media, debates, and everything else you can think of that changes from day to day. The right wing batshittery that plays with the base can and has worked when successfully fused with Dem incompetence. Not only did that not happen last month, there are warning signs it’s becoming an obsolete way of doing things.
And yet they’re still just charging ahead with this MAGA nonsense, acting surprised and even angry that there are tens of millions of Americans who simply don’t fucking care.