I can think of at least three reasons why the answer the answer is "yes".

1. There are more of them (proportionally) than there used to be. I may be wrong about this one because politics is in the news so much. Still it seems to me that a smaller percentage of voters could pass a civics test than 60 years ago. And with greater numbers there is a better chance that they will override the preference of the more informed.

2. There are greater differences between the candidates. Thus if the candidate who would have been elected if only the more informed were voting, loses, there is a greater difference in how how the government behaves than in previous years.

3. It is more likely that the uninformed will NOT break approximately 50-50. In the old days it was close to 50-50.. Which meant that in the old days the winner was almost always the winner among the informed. But nowadays the candidate who knows he will get the lessor number of votes from the informed invokes deceptive strategies specifically targeted to the uninformed. Some sophisticated, some outright lying.

I'm not sure what the best way to fix this would be. But it doesn't seem like the best way is for the candidate who would win if only informed voted, to take on the tactics of the other candidate.

1 is tricky. Because so much information is available, I suspect that the percentage of people who consider themselves well-informed has gone up. But the nuance is that a lot of people who consider themselves well-informed are more accurately described as heavily informed. In other words, they are heavy consumers of information, but a lot of what they consume is inaccurate.

2 is true.

3 is a very interesting theory imo. I would be quite keen to see data on whether uninformed voters are less likely to break 50-50 than they were 30 years ago.

Agree 100%.

What is the root cause of #1?

It's a really interesting topic but there's so much to question. Scammers have great success conning the 'informed' class. Maybe more so than the more uninformed.

Plus it's very apparent when talking politics to people irl that posters on these board are in a tiny top echelon of the informed - even the ones we might thing aren't. At least they have some interest in what is going on - most people can't be bothered at all and know almost nothing about even uncontentious staightforward matters of fact.

Define "informed voter"!

Informed by whom about what? The enemy, the opposition, the government? About the real truth or about the latest propaganda or even fake news? We are living in the age of desinformation where being "informed" is reserved to intelligence agencies like the NSA.

Note: I am excluding scientists, because even their business is getting more and more compromised. 2+2 still equals 4, but it's not clear how long scientists will be allowed to say it. It only needs a certain group to be offended by the number 4 these days to request radical changes, and I am sure you can find such people somewhere, otherwise you can still pay a bunch of actors.

Being informed enough to recognize the less informed, such as that less informed leads to underestimating being informed enough, is possibly enough information to proceed to curb the power of the less informed. What a power advantage to have in a power struggle based on estimations- being underestimated.

I'm not sure what period of time in US history the OP has in mind, but I'm hard pressed to think of a time where the average American public was well informed of the issues.

Was it before the second Gulf war where 42% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11?

Was it in the late 18th century where the Constitutional congress felt that the public shouldn't directly vote for President or their Senators?

People knew more about the theoretical workings of civics back 60 years ago, but more today know the actual workings of civics.

So you can think of a reason why you're wrong(vastly increased news coverage) and no reason why you're right, but you still assume that there are more of them? Why?

This is also pretty much unsupported, Johnson-Goldwater and FDR-Hoover seem like they had pretty big ideological splits.

Candidates have lied about each other for the entire existence of politics.

Your business partner voted for someone who doesn't know the definition of "trade deficit" to be President.

"Informed voters" vote for the "right" candidate!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality


P.S.: Nice comic. That one really got me laughing

The idea that Hoover and FDR had a big ideological split is analogous to Bush Jr. having a big difference in Iraq policy from the Clinton admin. It was just a continuation of policy and the differences were minimal. https://www.history.com/news/great-d...oover-new-deal http://archive.boston.com/bostonglob..._hoovers_name/

Most people think Hoover was this austere, laissez-faire businessman because of some random quote from his Treasury secretary. The reality was Hoover doubled spending in real terms and tripled as a share of GDP with public works projects like the Hoover Dam and he increased the top marginal tax rate from 25% to 63% along with a massive tariff.

Hoover went so far left on economic policy that FDR's campaign ran on the creeping socialism caused by Hoover.

"Although Roosevelt would oversee a dramatic expansion of the federal government himself, he attacked Hoover during the 1932 presidential campaign for engaging in “reckless and extravagant” spending and ran on a Democratic platform calling for “an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures” by at least 25 percent. Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, went so far as to accuse Hoover of “leading the country down the path of socialism.”"

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/googl...-algorithm.php

Maybe voters just refuse to be "informed".

I'd say probably not, being elected is after all determined by getting the most votes, not about being best for the job. That has not changed since the dawn of the modern democracy.

What is happening is more likely that a) We see the outcome of elections more directly, with modern information systems and media. The incompetence has less places to hide. b) We tend to see the past as somehow more competent and intentional, probably because we fill the gaps in knowledge with illusions of order.

I mean, yeah... we might get the impression that everything is off the rails, but not many decades ago we lived in world where it was widely held that the best approach towards security was aiming enough ready-to-launch nuclear weapons at each-other to ensure total mutual destruction. The foreign policy equivalent of forcing a polite conversation by holding guns pointed at each-other with a finger on the trigger.