Did Donald Trump Win The Nomination Because Republican Voters Are Dumb? (article title) [View all]

[SummerSnow]

John McQuaid , CONTRIBUTOR
Journalist
MAY 12, 2016


Everybody’s looking for reasons why all the predictions were wrong, and how a modern American political party could come to nominate a candidate like Donald Trump. Jonathan Chait argues that it’s because most political prognosticators could not accept that many Republican voters are short some IQ points:

As low as my estimation of the intelligence of the Republican electorate may be, I did not think enough of them would be dumb enough to buy his act. And, yes, I do believe that to watch Donald Trump and see a qualified and plausible president, you probably have some kind of mental shortcoming. As many fellow Republicans have pointed out, Donald Trump is a con man. What I failed to realize — and, I believe, what so many others failed to realize, though they have reasons not to say so — is just how easily so many Republicans are duped.

While I agree that Trump is unqualified to be president, and that nominating him is a big mistake, can you really attribute his victory to collective idiocy? Clearly something went wrong here, but you can’t plot the Trump phenomenon as a function of intelligence. Republican voters have had plenty of chances to elect Trump-esque candidates before (e.g., Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain) and they went with traditional, party-minted choices – until this year. Have GOP voters literally gotten stupider in the past four years? Clearly not.

It’s a mistake to look at voting, especially for president, as a rational process of weighing costs and benefits. Most individual voters don’t think much about policies or the practical realities of running the federal bureaucracy, dealing with Congress, or managing international alliances – the stuff Trump is so pathetically clueless about. They don’t put the candidates’ budget proposals in spreadsheets to compare them or see if the numbers add up. Unlike offices such as local mayor or school board member, what the president does on a daily basis is far removed from the realities of most people’s lives. So most of us treat the choice more abstractly. It reflects how people feel about the country, about character. And when feelings run high, policy recedes. Many people, I suspect, think the American political system is pretty sturdy (if paradoxically dysfunctional) and the damage any individual can do is limited. So, you don’t cast a vote for president to implement policies, but to express yourself, to send a message, to jar the system. Trump is the purest distillation of this tendency.

read the rest at the link http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmcquaid/2016/05/12/did-donald-trump-win-the-nomination-because-republican-voters-are-dumb/#33b600886ed4

*willful ignorance*