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I've never really liked the term "low information voter" -- because it's too optimistic. It suggests that the solution is the addition of data.

The term was coined in the early 90s, before the widespread popularity of the Web. Perhaps there was an argument to be made that some voters were merely uninformed. Today, we are if anything over-informed. We have everything we could possibly want to know at our fingertips.

At this point, though, I don't even think that flood of information is the problem. More recently, there has been an insistence that people can say whatever they want, regardless of its truth. Which is, legally, true. But it's disheartening to me that often, people often don't seem to care whether they're getting true information or not. It suffices to them that they have a legal right to it.

I don't really know what to do about any of that. At the time this term was coined, I believed that we had differences not of information, but of values. In that environment, we could build up some kind of way of living together based on the values we did share, and finding some kind of compromise when we didn't.

But at this point, the conflict itself seems to be primary. And it's not due to lack of information, or even a clash of values, but a deeply ingrained and personal dislike.

Such a condescending phrase.

We should have a similar phrase "low information expert" that has little understanding of everyday people's lives, but instead points to metrics that have little to do with everyday life of real people.

It's a condescending phrase, but I can't think of a better alternative. A different term won't change the fact that each group thinks that the other makes consistently bad choices. There's just no way to avoid a negative term.

The way I see it, there are two possibilities. Either they're right, that one set of people is consistently misinformed, or they're wrong.

If they're wrong, then we'd have to find some way to convince them of that. It won't be just a matter of finding a different phrase. The condescension itself would be undeserved, and we'd have to root that out somehow.

Or they're right, in which case they might as well be as descriptive a term as they can. There would be literal "condescending", which originally referred to nobility or aristocrats "going down with" their social inferiors. The term was actually viewed favorably at the time -- it implied humility and generosity.

Either way, I don't see what to do about it.

It’s describing phenomena that’s observable in a sample from a Gaussian distribution, what’s condescending about that?
Yeah totally fair.

I think I respond to how I hear it used to describe other people with just different experiences. Like I feel there's a degree of empathy to someone voting because they can't get a job, and are skeptical of "experts" that may be out of touch, not because they have a deep intellectual grasp of the issues.

I find some of the linked-to articles under §See also amusing:

* Anti-intellectualism

* Political literacy

* Populism

* Useful idiot

* Voting advice application

* Voting behavior