Polling data show that Donald Trump’s supporters were deeply misinformed about most of the campaign’s defining issues. Only if this is attributable to bad actors exploiting a broken information ecosystem, rather than an electoral majority that chooses to be misinformed, can there be hope of a healthier politics in America.
BERKELEY – Three days after Donald Trump’s victory in this year’s US presidential election, my friend Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research tweeted: “I hate to put a lot of highly paid pundits out of business, but look at this f**king graph.” The accompanying image was an Ipsos infographic headlined: “Misinformed views on immigration, crime, the economy correlated with ballot choice.”