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Comment by intermerda | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, the party of wealthy elites wants to tax incomes more than 400k, tax capital gains, is pro regulation. Whereas the party of working class wants to eliminate income tax, institute worldwide tariffs, is anti-regulation to the point of wanting to bring asbestos back. Makes total sense.

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I'm not talking about party policy; I'm talking about party composition.

My conclusion from all of this is that most low-information voters really do make their decisions based on personality and message, rather than ideology or policy.

Dems always shoot themselves in the foot by putting up candidates that middle america just can't seem to relate to.

Trump might be the epitome of what middle america hates: a privileged city landlord who lives in opulence. But it doesn't matter, because he speaks their language.

Kamala only sounds smart and educated to other smart and educated people. She sounds snooty and condescending to everyone else.

I also think calling them "low-information" is incredibly ethnocentric, to the point of offense. Perhaps they just weight their information differently, especially when they exist at different levels of Maslow's hierarchy? It is hard to be "enlightened" (which probably in and of itself means different things to different folks) when youre hustling for food and rent. Poverty is exhausting; poverty impacts higher cognition.

Meanwhile, the Dems are seen as the party of DEI, which are wayyyyy above base survival needs, accoring to that hierarchy.

"low information voters" is a term for people that vote on relatively low levels of information regarding candidates or policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_information_voter

The term has nothing to do with enlightenment or even identity politics.

whooooossshhhhhhhh

Edited, to respond more substantively with a quote from your source:

>Linguist George Lakoff has written that the term is a pejorative mainly used by American liberals to refer to people who vote conservative against what liberals assume to be their own interests and assumes they do it because they lack sufficient information. Liberals, he said, attribute the problem in part to deliberate Republican efforts at misinforming voters.

I get your point: condescension against low-information voters doesn't help.

But I think that your argument that the term "low-information" has no use just because it's been used with condescension by some is incorrect.

Instead of wasting cognitive energy of finding a new term for the same exact group of people, I think we should focus on treating them with the respect their sizable number of votes deserve.

Of course -- I don't expect people grinding paycheck-to-paycheck to be spending time mulling over their political ideologies or the merits of proposed policy proposals. And in fact, that's exactly my point. I'm not disparaging their situation, I'm describing it.

We do agree, I am just pointing out what once may have been a technical term (idiot, moron) may have become more of a disparagement these days.

Woah, we just speedran "low information is racist" to "poor people are stupid", I've never seen anything like it.

No one said a thing about race. Look up a definition of "ethnocentric" please; ethnocentrism also refers to cultural normativity. Specifically, I was referring to the following idea which can be found on the Wikipedia article on the term "low information voter":

It seems to me you are the one applying racial priors to my comment.

As for the second jerky thing you said:

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-poverty-af...

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1238041

https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(22)00428-7/abs...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5266697/

https://neurosciencenews.com/poverty-neurodevelopment-behavi...

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c13830/revisions/...

https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/article/179/2/535/7068210?lo...

Kamala only sounds smart and educated to other smart and educated people.

Serious question, Can you please provide a video of her sounding smart and educated?

I'm not trying to convince anyone that she is. My point is the opposite: that many people do not. If you don't, then great, that's what I'm talking about.

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