I got 57/60 on the horribly biased, Reagan-worshiping test that Ashish provided (at Davidson, that would have been a B-). But I digress. I don’t think that test is a general knowledge test by any means – and this is coming from a guy whose job it is to know almost every candidate’s position on almost every issue.

@Ashish I’m surprised that you didn’t check in with “The American Voter,” the landmark dis to the American Electorate. It’s even more of a smackdown than John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?”. Now, V.O. Key and many other political scientists responded. Key came back and in his own book says “Voters are not fools.” IMHO, the jury is still out, at least based on the 30,000 or so doors I’ve knocked on in my political lifetime … anyway, the WaPo had a great article recently about the follow-up to “The American Voter” which reinforces some of your points while providing a silver lining for Pat and others:

But wait, says Amy Gershkoff, who wrote her Princeton dissertation on issues and voting behavior and now advises left-of-center campaigns on how to target voters. She’s got her own sports metaphor. Just as Beltway junkies know far more about policy issues than the average voter, baseball junkies know far more statistics than she does. But she still loves to watch the Yankees.

“Even though I can’t rattle off the batting averages of every person on the team and every person on every other team doesn’t mean that I can’t derive pleasure from the game,” she says.

In other words, Gershkoff says, she knows enough. Many Americans vote primarily because of one or two or three issues, she says. They might care a whole lot about health care or prayer in schools and not at all about foreign policy, and maybe that leaves them sounding dumb when they’re asked about Iraq. But they know enough about the issues they care about, and that’s what they vote on.

Now, does the intellectual prowess of the electorate even matter? I think this is the real question. Already, the most important members of our government are decided by the elite. In this first example, the elite are simply the minority of Americans who can and do vote. In the era of Texas Redistricting and other bipartisan decisions to disenfranchise voters, this elite group’s participation in party primaries decides the majority of elections in our nation. Usually, that’s 10-20% of the 40-50% that are registered in one party out of the 70% of people that are registered voters … or 3-7% of Americans. In many races 3-7% of the voters are the “deciders.”

On a home-town note, only 24% of the 66% of the Charlotteans that are registered to vote voted for Mayor in 2007. In a way, they decided whether or not Pat McCrory would be able to run for Governor (a loss would have hurt his chances greatly). He won in large part because Democrats didn’t come out to vote … and because the Chamber of Commerce targeted moderate, educated voters for the Bonds/Transit campaign instead of the traditional Democratic base. Don’t believe that was a coincidence.

It gets even worse down the ballot. The state houses members that make our laws, the judges that interpret our laws, the school board members and county commissioners that touch our daily lives, the district court judges that are the thin black line between us getting a small fine for “improper equipment” and having our license revoked for going 80 in a School Zone … they have to depend on Direct Mail and other voter contact methods to get their message out, and their ability to do direct mail and contact voters depends in large part on their ability to please prospective donors in real estate & development, finance, law, and other elite groups. This is the second group of “elite.”

Like the tobacco companies that run anti-smoking ads, candidates are the ones who educate the most voters, and this education is funded by the elite and the special interest PACs. Don’t kid yourself – even if it’s just a few TV ads or a few mail pieces – candidates, parties, and 527s educate the voters, even if they don’t know more than one right enumerated by the First Amendement.

And the media this year is killing me. The presidential race is “tied” when Obama is 100 EVs ahead in electoral college projections? Isn’t there a sliver of a chance that reporting from the Wolfgang Blitzkrieg and Gracy Jane types is motivated by profit margins? A blowout isn’t good TV.

@Taylor I agree with the OP. As quixotic as it is, the only solution to our problems is more education and more participation. Otherwise, the elite are the puppets of our political process … and the only difference between the candidates and the electorate is that the candidates can see the strings.

If you have any questions contact me at any timie.

Nisha Thompson
Sunlight Foundation
Organizer and Outreach Coordinator
nthompson(at)sunlightfoundation(dot)com

My point, applied on a wider scope, is this: the traditional means of evaluating and judging the competence of the younger generations are inadequate. The under-30’s think, learn, and do much differently than our elders. There is no question that there is much work to be done in terms of stimulating and encouraging the electorate to think critically about today’s problems and the potential solutions for them. But pre-judging their ability or inclination to do so based on misleading data and surveys is not putting the best foot forward in that effort.

In other words, what matters is what happens when you step away from the computer. What do you feel about what you’ve read, heard, and seen? The digital age can do a lot of things, but it can’t make people synthesize their experiences any better or any worse than members of preceding generations could. That’s why we need people to be able to summon, unaided, a decent knowledge of their history, traditions, and culture: So they can use those moments of quiet to shepherd the information they take in to a purposeful conclusion.

That’s the promise I see in these tools. They give the new, “wired” generation the tools they need to find information and skip the sound bytes. It caters to their abilities to quickly digest, compare, and make choices and judgments about information.