It is both objectively true that democracy is the best form of government that should be protected… And that the American electorate is aggressively uninformed. I say this not with judgment or disrespect, just that dating back to 2007 I have done phone banking and knocked on doors in Iowa, New Hampshire, Georgia, California, Nevada, and Arizona, and I will say: My experience has not been that the electorate is making deep and thoughtful choices, as much as just sort of deciding on vibes what they believe.

(Full disclosure: after the 2020 election, I stopped doing this work. I got burnt out.)

There was also a study done last year that found that the average American voter absorbed 10 minutes of news per week. Couple that with polling that regularly shows that large percentages of Americans can’t tell you what the three branches of government are, name a single Supreme Court Justice, or even tell you who the vice president is and I ask:

What is a nonjudgmental way of discussing this phenomenon?

It’s one thing to say the voters are stupid in a contemptuous way.

It’s another to say that building consensus and political coalitions is hard where there are a lot of voters (both left and right and center) who are simply not deeply informed about a lot of things pertaining to constitutional government and the issues.

Having worked in politics, I can say that it’s very difficult to do voter outreach when you find that a lot of voters have very contradictory demands of their elected officials, and do not follow the ins and outs of our government (or legislation) with deep detail