By Jenna McCarthy - October 11, 2024

Ever since Killary put [half of] Trump supporters into what she famously dubbed a “basket of deplorables,” the Ignorant, Hillbilly Trump Voter trope persists. Embodied in a single person, his name would be Earl and he’s a die-hard fan of football, freedom, and firearms—not necessarily in that order. He owns a TV only to watch NASCAR and hasn’t picked up a newspaper in decades. After he washes his pork ribs and Cheeto pie down with some homemade moonshine, he wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his “Don't Tread on Me” hoodie, throws his dog Cooter into the bed of his pickup and heads to the KKK rally downtown. (He takes Cooter pert near erywhere these days, on accounta them illegals eatin’ the damn critters.) He’s convinced Trump will not only save the country but would personally come over to help him fix his lawnmower if he asked.

The ostensibly prestigious New Yorker, known for its iconic cartoons, sophisticated writing, and scathing cultural critique, recently attempted to unmask Earl and his dimwitted kinfolk for its highfalutin readers.

TL; DR: You’re dumb because you don’t watch CNN

From the comically one-dimensional piece:

In April, NBC News released the results of a poll that looked at how a thousand respondents consumed political news, and how they planned to vote. At the time, Biden was the overwhelming favorite among people who read newspapers, watched network news, and followed online news sites. Trump, meanwhile, led among those who frequently got their information from social media, cable news, and YouTube. The poll also showed that Trump most dominated among a subset of people described as “low-information voters.” Definitions of this group vary among experts, some of whom begin by pointing to the ubiquity of ignorance.

“Trump’s whole playbook was to attract these people,” insisted Richard Fording, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Low-information voters, he found, are more likely to embrace stereotypes of other groups, and less likely to fact-check claims made by politicians. “Trump was kind of the perfect candidate for them,” he said.

After the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked, and voters largely stuck with Trump, Fording dug deeper into the low-information category. He came across a metric in psychology called the “need for cognition” scale. “A question that really caught my attention on the scale is an agree or disagree: ‘Thinking is not my idea of fun,’” Fording recalled. He and a colleague ran a study to see whether agreement with the statement correlated with support for Trump. It did.

In case you’re missing the flashing neon implication here, “low-information” means . . .

[SNIP]