Amanda Marcotte writes:

Perhaps out of fear of insulting their audiences, the pundits, journalists, and political consultants engaged in the lengthy post-mortem about Donald Trump’s horrific victory Tuesday are avoiding the most obvious cause: ignorance. Millions of people who desperately want more progressive policies cast their ballots for a man whose agenda is exactly the opposite of what they want.

On Fox News Wednesday, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt insisted, “The American people delivered a resounding victory for President Trump and it gives him a mandate.” His regressive agenda was even given a sinister name — Project 2025 — and published online, where anyone could read the plans to shrink workers’ paychecks, ban abortion nationwide, and decimate access to health care. Yet the polls tell a much different story. In state after state, voters backed both Trump and ballot initiatives that advanced and protected progressive goals. Laws protecting abortion rights were backed by the majority of voters in most states, even deep-red ones like Missouri, Montana, and even Florida — where the initiative only failed because Republicans set a 60% supermajority threshold. In Missouri, 12% of voters backed both abortion rights and Trump. Red state voters also backed initiatives to raise the minimum wage, ensure paid sick and family leave, and even ban employers from forcing employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union presentations. Democrats like Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who are strongly associated with these progressive policies, were also able to win where Vice President Kamala Harris failed.

In response, many progressives blamed Democrats. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Democrats “abandoned working class people,” claiming that is why Harris lost. It’s a tempting fiction because it allows progressives to feel a measure of control over the situation. We all would love to believe making different choices will lead to better outcomes. But Sanders knows it’s not true. He himself worked closely with Biden to improve labor organizing and reduce healthcare costs. He shared Biden’s disappointment that the Build Back Better plan that would have done even more was killed off by centrists who have since left the party. He knows that Democrats would have done more, if not hobbled by Republicans who control the House. And he knows that, if people were voting on policy, they would vote for Democrats. Trump, after all, will actively dismantle existing policies people like.

The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or messaging. It’s ignorance. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump’s “aesthetics and attitudes” but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris’ were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren’t hers.

When voters have factual information about the candidates, they prefer Democrats. Polls from earlier this year show that people who consume news from journalistic outlets — newspapers, network news programs, and news websites — overwhelmingly planned to vote for the Democratic candidate. Newspaper readers clocked in at 70% Democratic support, and network news viewers were 55% Democratic. News website readers were only less so because the survey didn’t distinguish between legitimate sites like Salon and bunk outlets like Breitbart, but still: merely being a person who reads stuff makes you more liberal. In states where heavy ad spending helped educate voters a little more on Harris’ plans, she lost less ground than in places where that money wasn’t spent.

The problem is most people simply do not absorb quality information. Instead, increasing numbers of Americans have a media diet that is mostly a bunch of lies, conspiracy theories, irrelevant diatribes and other such bunkum that right-wing propagandists use to deceive people. [Continue reading…]