When the Founding Fathers were drafting the Constitution, there was plenty of debate about who should be granted the right to vote. Although there wasn’t consensus, the prevailing sentiment among many of the framers was that voting should be restricted to those who had a stake in society— meaning property owners, who were assumed to be more educated and invested in the country's well-being. This idea was rooted in a fear of "mob rule," where uneducated masses might make decisions detrimental to the republic. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison expressed concern about the potential dangers of majority rule, particularly if the majority were uninformed or swayed by demagogues. Alexander Hamilton also shared similar worries, fearing that too broad a franchise could lead to instability.
Generally speaking, property requirements were seen as a proxy for education and many delegates believed that only property owners should vote because they were presumed to have the knowledge and independence necessary to make informed decisions. Some framers, like Benjamin Franklin, argued against overly restrictive voting requirements, suggesting that the republic should be more inclusive. Ultimately, the Constitution left the determination of voter qualifications largely to the states, leading to a patchwork of voting rights across the early republic.
South Carolina had some of the strictest voting requirements in the early years of the Republic. It required voters to own a significant amount of property, which inherently limited the vote to wealthier, and by extension, more educated individuals. Additionally, South Carolina's laws were designed to maintain the power of the wealthy planter class, which often meant that only those with formal education and significant social standing could vote. Virginia and Massachusetts had similar restrictions. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina were the least restrictive. Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution eliminated property requirements for voting, allowing all tax-paying free men to vote. This broadened the electorate significantly and included men of more modest means and education levels. The same year, New Jersey’s constitution allowed all inhabitants who were worth £50 (a relatively modest sum, around $222 in today’s buying power) to vote, regardless of gender. This meant that women who met the property requirement could vote until 1807, making New Jersey one of the least restrictive states in terms of voter qualifications, though this was later rolled back.
Like many Southern states, Georgia initially imposed property qualifications for voting. Georgia’s 1777 constitution required that voters be free white men who owned at least 50 acres of land or had property valued at £10. This property requirement was relatively modest compared to states like Virginia or South Carolina, making Georgia somewhat less restrictive in terms of property ownership (supposed educational attainment).
Yesterday, Charles Bethea’s engaging essay Among America’s “Low-Information” Voters starts off in Rome, Georgia, the county seat of Floyd County, which gave Trump a 69.9% victory against Biden. In 2022, Floyd County also voted 20,950 (67%) to 10,405 (33%) for Marjorie Traitor Greene, generally considered the stupidest member of Congress, someone entirely motivated by ignorance, hatred and crackpot conspiracy theories. Most Members of Congress— of both parties— are embarrassed that she sits among them. But not Rome voters, who have the 4th lowest educational attainment level of any place in Georgia, almost a quarter of whom haven't earned a high school diploma.
Bethea began with one of Traitor Greene’s constituents, Monica Sheppard who’s surrounded by morons, some of whom are her acquaintances. “Rome,” he wrote “is a right-leaning town in the rural, poor, and intensely conservative northwest corner of the state. Education rates are low, and mainstream news does not easily take root [and Traitor Greene] was elected in part because, for many voters, identifying with the QAnon conspiracy theory, as she’d recently done, was less troubling than identifying with The Times.” Pernicious conspiracy theories have replaced actual news in Floyd County. Other big source of “news”: televangelists, Newsmax and Facebook.
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. “If you know what the F.T.C. did last week, you’re a freak,” David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, told me. There were gaps in basic political knowledge even among law professors he knew. “It’s just a matter of degree,” he said. Nonetheless, he continued, low-information voters tend to have “fewer observations about politics with which to make vote choices.”
…Richard Fording, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, who has written about low-information voters, told me that they “generally just vote in Presidential-election years— if they vote at all.” These voters seem to have once been spread pretty evenly between the political parties. Low-information voters who turned out for Bill Clinton in 1992 may have known little more than that he played the saxophone; some George W. Bush voters may have simply associated the former governor of Texas with the South. Partisan pundits have long blamed the successes of candidates they oppose on such voters. In 2012, the late right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh pointed to them to explain Barack Obama’s popularity. “We’re gonna have to redefine low-information voter,” Limbaugh said. “They’re not just people watching TMZ. In fact, I would venture to say that over half of the average, ordinary Democrats voting for Obama have no clue what they’re really doing.”
By 2016, Fording told me, low-information voters appeared to be moving to the right. (His analysis specifically examined white low-information voters, whom he defined as those unable to correctly answer two of the three following questions: how long is a U.S. senator’s term, which party currently controls the House, and which party controls the Senate.) “Trump’s whole playbook was to attract these people,” Fording stated. 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.
Fording admits that the concept “sounds very condescending.” But, he told me, “it’s been extensively studied for decades: people vary in terms of the enjoyment they get out of searching for new information.” It’s not a measure of intelligence, and, though it correlates with education level, it’s not the same thing: some low-information voters have college degrees. Whatever their education, low-need-for-cognition voters are less likely to seek out alternative views, and more likely to trust people they respect. In November of 2016, as Fording had anticipated, they showed up in significantly larger numbers for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton. Given that they are not highly mobilized voters, Fording said, “it was kind of an impressive feat Trump pulled off.”
…Plenty of voters defy easy categorization: evangelicals who vote for candidates connected to porn stars, prison abolitionists who vote for career prosecutors. Fording, at the University of Alabama, pointed out another example: the kind of voter who does enjoy thinking, but who uses dubious information to “connect the dots in weird ways.” There is now so much bad information floating around that thoughtful people, skeptical of the mainstream news, can do their own research and reach their own conclusions: The covid vaccine will kill you. The Bidens are felons. These people can influence the low-information voters around them.
It's no secret that when Trump won in 2016, he thanked the poorly educated and said he loved them. He also claimed he won among the highly educated and several other demographic groups... but he was lying. If he and the GOP win in November, it will, once again, be because they have rallied America's low-info voters and morons.
Despite the "weird gang" appropriation I will still alwys love "Buckaroo Banzai"