Are American voters actually just stupid? A new poll suggests the answer may be “yes”

[ImpulsE69]

Don't need a poll to tell me this. Or is this fake news?

Ask a person why they support Trump or still support Trump. The only things they can say is "At least it isn't Hillary" and "Better than Obama". Too much intelligence there. The real stupidity is that those were our choices. Yes America, you did this to yourselves. What is funny is that people are still sticking up for him when he blatantly is going against them. I didn't want Hillary OR Trump, or any of the people we actually had to pick from. Yet, people took sides instead of saying "we need a re-roll". I think the person above talking about people thinking this is some kind of game is on to something.

 

[fskimospy]

There's been a lot of hand wringing over this particular poll. Not only does it have a margin of error, but it's too soon for people to admit that they regret making a bad decision on election day. There's also a question of how you interpret the results. For example, the Clinton voters who said they would vote third party if the election was held again were probably reluctant Clinton voters to begin with who just wanted Trump to lose. Knowing now that Trump won in the real election and assuming that same thing would happen in a second one, they wish they'd just voted their conscience and gone with third party.

Give it some more time and additional polls and let's see how it pans out.

Pretty much this. The easiest answer is that people don't like admitting or saying they voted for someone who lost. It's the same reason why the LA Times poll was so inaccurate in this most recent election.

 

[Bitek]

Shit, I could have told you that, and I didn't need a new poll and wall of text to do it.

How many times have we seen the public struggle to even get basic facts correct? How many retards still believe Iraq was behind 9/11?
Forget nuanced policy debates...

We finally have a president who actually reflects the common man. An overweight, loud mouth ignoramus who constantly tells stories of how awesome they were in high school.

 

[Grooveriding]

We know about half the population is below average intelligence. It would be an interesting study to get a large enough group of GOP / Dem voters assessed to get an idea if there are any trends reflecting that among their base.

I don't believe it's realistic to say the primary driver was stupidity though. Highly intelligent people can succumb to truly warped world views. It's not necessarily a weakness of being simple. It can be an unwillingness to accept new information and adjust one's worldview, even if the new information is not what we wanted to hear. Which is actually quite a difficult thing to do for all of us, just harder to do a better job of for some than others. You can also be a bigot and fearful racist and still be very intelligent, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. Look at the Nazis, there were some very intelligent and skilled people who committed atrocities with their experiments during WW2.

The right wing of the US has been bombarded by extreme propaganda for several decades now. They live in a bubble of amateurish news sources that are not really news, just propaganda outlets. A large portion subscribe to religious fanaticism and that identity has been incorporated into you having to be a Republican. This is particularly dangerous as it's inherently irrational and gives one the delusion that they are on the 'good' and 'right' side of things. They believe in conspiracy theories with no basis in fact. In fact you see many reject facts, express disdain for educated experts because they feel they are 'elite' and looking down on them. It's hard to be diplomatic about my opinion on what it looks like from the outside, but it doesn't look good for the future. A nation with a significant minority who are disconnected from reality to this degree, bred to hate the other side of the political aisle and will believe the word of their team's politicians over the reality of the facts - even to the extreme of it being a lying degenerate like Trump - are a threat to a functional democracy when they hit the voting booth. I have friends from school who are practicing in the US, as well as most of my family there. I see postings of those who are right leaning on their facebook pages and it often is truly demented. Images of Trump in the oval office office with an ethereal Jesus behind him holding his hand as he signs an EO with a caption 'Thank god for Trump' What do you do with someone like that ? These are not rational actors as this article states. I'd guess you could swing maybe 5% of adults who are that far gone back to reality.

I never paid much mind to US politics until Trump. But with the traditionally outwardly facing and adventurous nature of US foreign policy, and the fact that the US has devolved to the point an individual like him can become POTUS... The effect that can have globally is now a reasonable grounds to be concerned imo. It's reached the point where the irrationality of the right wing in the US is presenting a global threat via them having what I would say is the most powerful vote of any nation. When US policy is so relevant globally on important issues like climate change, NATO and unstable nation states - the importance of who is being elected to enact those policies becomes very important.

Right now it looks like there is a reasonable possibility the US is potentially on track to becoming a failed state. You have a President that attacks the legitimacy of your democracy and lies unabashedly about minor, as well as major, facts. Worse, you have a large portion of the electorate that believes these lies wholesale. They are more dangerous than the man himself. Even if the globe survives Trump, if he loses in 2020, what sort of fanatic potentially comes forward for the right in 2024 ? While America's military and economic strength is exceptional, the populace is no more exceptional than anywhere else in the world and many are more poorly informed about facts than you find in other developed nations.

 

[Thebobo]

Right. So when Obama won twice, it was an alternate universe of Americans.

I'm no Trump fan, but why can't some of you dipshits just accept the fact your shit candidate lost, and another shit candidate won?

With Russian help.

 

[soulcougher73]

Only about 1% of the US is actually smart..so..yeah. Just glad i fit into that 1%.. now if only i had 1%'er income to go along with it.

 

[Genx87]

I think the most inspiring thing in this article is how many Clinton supporters would vote 3rd party if given a redo. It shows more of the electorate is getting sick of the 2 party stranglehold on this country.

 

[Atreus21]

I think there are a large number of voters who look at elections in a very weird way. They don't see it as an opportunity to elect representatives who will work for their interests.

They see elections as a sports game.
"MY TEAM WON !!"

They support the candidate that they think will win. Or support a candidate because "he seems to be a nice fellow to drink a beer with". They see elections as an opportunity to get confirmation that they are part of the winning team. That makes them winners.

"I voted for Satan, and Satan won. I am a winner !!!"

This is true, but I bet it's more true for presidential elections than congressional or local elections. Presidential elections give us two morons to choose between. I can see the sports mentality naturally occurring from such conditions as it quite easily becomes us versus them.

I'm not sure there's any alternative, but oh well.

 

[thraashman]

Shit, I could have told you that, and I didn't need a new poll and wall of text to do it.

How many times have we seen the public struggle to even get basic facts correct? How many retards still believe Iraq was behind 9/11?
Forget nuanced policy debates...

We finally have a president who actually reflects the common man. An overweight, loud mouth ignoramus who constantly tells stories of how awesome they were in high school.

.... Jesus fucking Christ I just realized we elected Al Bundy...

 

[SMOGZINN]

Just try to remember how dumb the average person is, then remember that half of them are even dumber then that.

 

[fskimospy]

I think the most inspiring thing in this article is how many Clinton supporters would vote 3rd party if given a redo. It shows more of the electorate is getting sick of the 2 party stranglehold on this country.

It's very unlikely they would actually vote 3rd party. People are just willing to say that because they knew their vote didn't matter because Clinton lost. An election with three viable parties is essentially an impossible proposition due to poor foresight when drafting the constitution.

 

[zinfamous]

So, 4% of his voters won't vote for him again. That's way, way, way above the number of fringe voters (77k) that actually gave him the win.

It basically now puts him at a 5 point? loss to Hilary? lol.

 

[zinfamous]

Trump did lose the popular vote so losing even 4% of voters means less and less supporters. However, you can read articles about actual Trump voters in places like Oklahoma where they don't want the budget cuts he is proposing that will affect the programs these voters depend on but they will still support Trump because he is doing something about the illegals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/...trump-budget-cuts-but-still-loyalty.html?_r=0

Here are Trump voters in a food pantry in NY bemoaning the proposed cuts that literally will take food away from them but they still support Trump.
http://buffalonews.com/2017/04/16/wyoming-county-voters-stand-trump-despite-budget-cuts/

Honestly, I have stopped caring. These cuts need to happen so people actually believe that the Republicans will do this and give the money to the rich. Yeah, gut Obamacare and remove essential benefits. People need to be reminded of the Republican failed leadership under George W Bush, etc.

How will that change anything? Reagan did this to them, G Dubs did this to them. It has happened over and over, yet they still don't believe it? How will that change with Trump, who is also very vocally distracting them with soundbytes that finally reflect the very things that they have always believed? (blacks are evil! Gays are the devil! Jews stole this country from good Christians! Immigrants killed my dog and took my job!)

A shitton of Trump voters were first-time voters. These are people that finally came out of hiding because he was feeding them the racism and hate and ultrapopulist nonsense babble that their traditional major party only ever merely paid lipservice to, without directly addressing. Trump took those Klansmen and American Nazis back into the republican fold that they had long rejected, for not being "honest" enough about the decades of dog whistling that had long been used to court them, if only in spirit.

I want to believe that this is merely a fringe group of voters in this country, but I honestly don't know. It's often the smallest groups are the loudest, so I'll stick to that. But the American Nazis that Trump has brought into the forefront of political discussion these days sure seem to be the dominant paradigm.

 

[soulcougher73]

This is true, but I bet it's more true for presidential elections than congressional or local elections. Presidential elections give us two morons to choose between. I can see the sports mentality naturally occurring from such conditions as it quite easily becomes us versus them.

I'm not sure there's any alternative, but oh well.

They gave us more than two morons to choose between, but most never took their gaze of the biggest two morons to ever give the others a chance. Sad really.

 

[momeNt]

Well, poll tests are out of the question. So now that we have all made our bed, we get to sleep in it.

 

[Genx87]

It's very unlikely they would actually vote 3rd party. People are just willing to say that because they knew their vote didn't matter because Clinton lost. An election with three viable parties is essentially an impossible proposition due to poor foresight when drafting the constitution.

I tend to agree with you a viable 3 or 4 party election is impossible given our setup. But I do think some of these people will vote third party next election unless the democrats can find good candidate. 3rd party totals this last cycle increased by nearly 5 million votes over 2012.

 

[Genx87]

So, 4% of his voters won't vote for him again. That's way, way, way above the number of fringe voters (77k) that actually gave him the win.

It basically now puts him at a 5 point? loss to Hilary? lol.

Eh you need to deduct the sizeable amount of people who said they wouldnt vote for Clinton if a redo would happen. It is right in the article.

However, while Trump would retain almost all of his support if the election were held again today (96 percent), fewer of Clinton’s supporters say they’d stick with her (85 percent), producing a 40-43 percent Clinton-Trump result in a hypothetical redo among self-reported 2016 voters.

I think this is pretty damning of how bad Clinton was as a candidate. It basically says people voted for her because of Trump.

 

[fskimospy]

I tend to agree with you a viable 3 or 4 party election is impossible given our setup. But I do think some of these people will vote third party next election unless the democrats can find good candidate. 3rd party totals this last cycle increased by nearly 5 million votes over 2012.

I tend to doubt it. People were burned by third parties again in this election cycle like in 2000. For example Ralph Nader went from almost 3% of the vote in 2000 to 0.4% of the vote in 2004 and it's not like Kerry was some amazing candidate. People like myself who had voted third party in 2000 realized that it's an incredibly bad idea and abandoned it. It's sad that only 16 years later the same lesson had to be learned again.

 

[fskimospy]

Eh you need to deduct the sizeable amount of people who said they wouldnt vote for Clinton if a redo would happen. It is right in the article.

I think this is pretty damning of how bad Clinton was as a candidate. It basically says people voted for her because of Trump.

These results should be taken with a dump truck full of salt. Like I said earlier empirical research shows that people often falsely self report voting behavior both in who they voted for and if they voted at all after the fact.

 

[Jhhnn]

With Russian help.

Trumpsters never think twice about finding themselves on the same side of the argument as Russian psyops. Never even blink. Never even back away from it far enough to ask "Why would they favor Trump? What's their motivation? What's in it for them?"

 

[Indus]

Yes, American voters really are stupid. But of course not you.

And definitely not me.

Well to vote for him when he lies and scams for a living is ... (I'll let you fill in the blank)

Only about 1% of the US is actually smart..so..yeah. Just glad i fit into that 1%.. now if only i had 1%'er income to go along with it.

I would disagree with that number. I would say 15% of us are really smart and have IQ's above 125 and investigate all but a lot are just I believe what I believe so leave me alone. That 15% likes lower taxes and less government interference so 10% of that lies on the conservative side and 5% of that on the liberal side and its that 15% which swings elections with the electoral college.

And yeah I'm not afraid to say it, I despised Hillary but I voted for her anyways so it truly reflects some people.

 

[tweaker2]

I would add to the stupidity a whole lot of laziness in this recipe for disaster that we've now had prepared and served to us on a billionaire's golden platter.

It's small wonder that the GOP relies on low information voters to garner wins because emotional issues without substance now become the foremost weapon of choice and we've all seen how effectively that worked for Trump.

What we've also witnessed is that you can't put out a fire with a bucket of facts and figures that points to the truth of the matter that that fire is merely a mirage, a figment planted in the hopes of overgrowing the reality of things.

The only thing that prevents the GOP from REALLY going to town on their propaganda war against the people of the nation is the fact that their own greed and selfishness constantly exposes their hypocrisy, their agenda that speaks to how their propaganda really is nothing more than empty words fashioned to trigger raw emotions in order to overcome the true enemy of the BIG LIE they hide behind so as to allow them to do their dirty work for the few very wealthy people who own their asses.

Splitting the working class (of whom coincidentally represent the vast majority of voters) into two warring camps is the prime goal of the very wealthy and they are doing one fine job of it.

For if the working class would unite against them, all is lost.

 

[HomerJS]

Troll thread is troll.

Maybe, but if you started a thread "Obama worst President in history" I would answer with facts and logic not tuck my nuts away and cry troll. Perhaps deep down you know we are right but your conscious doesn't want to admit it.

 

[Moonbeam]

Trump saw the seething resentment built up in the conservative base & played on it masterfully. Repubs built that resentment, cultivated it for decades with wedge issues & raw emotionalism. They filled in the blanks with astounding conspiracy theories about the opposition. Trump saw it for what it is- irrational people desperately seeking leadership, desperately trying to hold onto fundamentally inaccurate beliefs at any cost.

And he exploited it so brazenly that other Repubs thought it was too much, that it wouldn't work, that the lies were too obvious. They were mistaken. They still don't really see what they've done. They arrogantly believed they could always control it.

We know about half the population is below average intelligence. It would be an interesting study to get a large enough group of GOP / Dem voters assessed to get an idea if there are any trends reflecting that among their base.

I don't believe it's realistic to say the primary driver was stupidity though. Highly intelligent people can succumb to truly warped world views. It's not necessarily a weakness of being simple. It can be an unwillingness to accept new information and adjust one's worldview, even if the new information is not what we wanted to hear. Which is actually quite a difficult thing to do for all of us, just harder to do a better job of for some than others. You can also be a bigot and fearful racist and still be very intelligent, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. Look at the Nazis, there were some very intelligent and skilled people who committed atrocities with their experiments during WW2.

The right wing of the US has been bombarded by extreme propaganda for several decades now. They live in a bubble of amateurish news sources that are not really news, just propaganda outlets. A large portion subscribe to religious fanaticism and that identity has been incorporated into you having to be a Republican. This is particularly dangerous as it's inherently irrational and gives one the delusion that they are on the 'good' and 'right' side of things. They believe in conspiracy theories with no basis in fact. In fact you see many reject facts, express disdain for educated experts because they feel they are 'elite' and looking down on them. It's hard to be diplomatic about my opinion on what it looks like from the outside, but it doesn't look good for the future. A nation with a significant minority who are disconnected from reality to this degree, bred to hate the other side of the political aisle and will believe the word of their team's politicians over the reality of the facts - even to the extreme of it being a lying degenerate like Trump - are a threat to a functional democracy when they hit the voting booth. I have friends from school who are practicing in the US, as well as most of my family there. I see postings of those who are right leaning on their facebook pages and it often is truly demented. Images of Trump in the oval office office with an ethereal Jesus behind him holding his hand as he signs an EO with a caption 'Thank god for Trump' What do you do with someone like that ? These are not rational actors as this article states. I'd guess you could swing maybe 5% of adults who are that far gone back to reality.

I never paid much mind to US politics until Trump. But with the traditionally outwardly facing and adventurous nature of US foreign policy, and the fact that the US has devolved to the point an individual like him can become POTUS... The effect that can have globally is now a reasonable grounds to be concerned imo. It's reached the point where the irrationality of the right wing in the US is presenting a global threat via them having what I would say is the most powerful vote of any nation. When US policy is so relevant globally on important issues like climate change, NATO and unstable nation states - the importance of who is being elected to enact those policies becomes very important.

Right now it looks like there is a reasonable possibility the US is potentially on track to becoming a failed state. You have a President that attacks the legitimacy of your democracy and lies unabashedly about minor, as well as major, facts. Worse, you have a large portion of the electorate that believes these lies wholesale. They are more dangerous than the man himself. Even if the globe survives Trump, if he loses in 2020, what sort of fanatic potentially comes forward for the right in 2024 ? While America's military and economic strength is exceptional, the populace is no more exceptional than anywhere else in the world and many are more poorly informed about facts than you find in other developed nations.

Nice job here, in my opinion, summing up the facts of our condition. Congratulations also for hot going off on a tangent to attribute the malicious part religion plays in our lives to the falseness of religious belief. I just wanted to mention that because I have seen in you according to my own lights, the same sort of bigotry expressed to the totality of religion because of a similar 'stupidity' among its believers. The same kinds of human mental failings that are destroying our country's democracy from within, I believe, do the same thing to religion wherever it appears in it's true progressive form. The purpose of real religion, as I have come to understand it and therefore naturally in my opinion, is to awaken people from exactly the sleep you describe above, and like the enlightenment that produced our democracy, that is how it gets perverted.

The world is infected with the disease of self hate and that hate will always manifest when this fact is presented.
There is a god who goes by a million names and he is always found by those who die to their egos. To rail against this psychological fact that underpins religious faith is to deny the truth of our true nature's It is our true nature that the image of god was created in and, of course, our true natures are the result of our evolution in a universe that survival of the fittest directed us in. We are the universe and the universe is us. This becomes clear with the appearance of a conscious state of awareness that is an awareness of Oneness.

As you are a person who is atheistic about god I simply invite you to believe yourself less. Everything you say about religion as we see it in the world is true also in my opinion, but it is not the whole story. Religion is a bridge to a different way of seeing. The bridge means nothing. It is the seeing that is everything. the seeing and the being.

Again, nice post.

 

[Moonbeam]

The idea behind the link is to try to explain how somebody like Trump could get elected, how to account for and deal with the obvious psychopathology implied and the tremendous danger we are in that is, in turn, implied by that.

Our democracy is dead, except of course, in California, where some of the best monsters the republican party has produced come from, and the reaction on the left is fear and the typical disease that creates, denial and the process of rationalizing ones faults away.

All those millions of 'stupid, brain defective conservatives' who voted in Trump, did so out of fear, out of the fact that fear opens the mind to manipulation and a need for something to believe in. What the liberals in their infinite wisdom did, was to assure them that blacks, women, and trillions of Mexican illegals would be first in line for any job or too that might pop into existence, and that the downward path of American decline would be judiciously preserved by a masterfully skilled technocrat, well versed in the system. Judiciousness, in my opinion, would more properly manifest, in my opinion at lease, by a greater honesty about who else might deserve the term 'stupid'.