It’s dreary, dull, and cold outside, and my mood is not much better.
Everywhere I turn, there is just more bad news. Our state is already pushing extremist agendas and we’re still more than a month away from the regular legislative session. Every day comes with a new announcement that President-elect Trump has nominated yet another vastly unqualified candidate for some position or another while congressional Republicans continue to bend the knee to their wannabe dictator.
It’s almost enough to make me cut out all news consumption. But refusal to be informed is how we got here in the first place.
On the day of the election, Google searches for “Did Joe Biden drop out” started spiking. Searches for “tariff” skyrocketed in the three days after the election, once Trump had been declared the likely winner. Searches for “Project 2025” shot up on Nov. 6, as did searches for “Kamala Harris.”
I get it. The news is depressing more often than not, and sometimes we need to take a step back to protect our peace and our mental health.
But low-information voters — voters who do not engage, or engage very little, with political news and news sources — are part of the reason Trump ended up back in office.
Low-information/disengaged voters are “on average younger, more likely to be women, more likely to be Black or Hispanic, less educated, and have a lower household income than the average engaged American voter,” according to YouGov, an online research data and analytics group.
In a July analysis, YouGov found, “Disengaged voters are more likely to believe the country is out of control and on the wrong track. The greatest share of them are most concerned about prices and inflation and they are more likely to think the economy is getting worse than engaged voters are. Disengaged voters more often say they are politically independent than engaged voters do and are likelier to have less extreme views of politicians. …
“Disengaged voters also consume different kinds of media than engaged voters do. They are less likely than engaged voters to trust the news media and less likely to consume news from nearly every source. The two exceptions are social media and friends, family, and acquaintances; each group of voters are about equally likely to get news from both of these sources.”
I’ll admit I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of a low-information voter. But that’s my own experience causing a bias there: Most of my friends and family are politically engaged. They may not be activists, but they at least know what’s going on in the political arena and have some idea of how politics will impact their everyday lives.
In a similar vein, I was shocked to learn over 300 provisional ballots were thrown out in Mon County because the voter wasn’t actually registered to vote. It seemed like everywhere I looked leading up to the election, there were voter registration drives and reminders to check your registration. But again, I’m politically engaged and so are many of the people in my social sphere.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are very engaged and very informed when it comes to politics.
So what can we do about low-information voters?
This is one of the few occasions when I tackle a topic without a clear solution(s) in mind.
You can’t force someone to consume news. You can’t force them to read or watch trusted news sources. You can’t force them to fact check what they see on social media.
But I do see one silver lining: In the YouGov analysis, disengaged voters are more likely to get their news from friends, family, and social media.
That means there’s an opening for us, as engaged voters, to get information to our disengaged friends and family.
That doesn’t mean info-dumping on them or filling their inboxes with news articles we’ve found or lecturing them.
Rather, we can come to conversations with our disengaged loved ones armed with facts. When they complain about the economy, we can gently remind them that as much as our pocketbooks hurt at the moment, inflation has come down significantly and the overall economy is doing pretty well. When they wonder why certain things are happening in government, we can share what we know about the situation. When they repeat social media rumors or falsehoods, we can reply with, “I heard about that, so I looked into it and found …”
I think the key is to talk with our low-information friends and family, not talk at them.
These aren’t people who actively seek out political information, and we don’t want to scare them (or anger them) to the point that they shut out the news even more.
But we also don’t need to take on the emotional burden of becoming our loved ones’ sole source of news. So there’s a careful balance to be struck between protecting ourselves and doing our part to protect democracy.
J. Nelson - Writer 