Voters Just Aren’t That Bright
In American politics, dumbing things down pays off. And it shows.
This post is by contributor Jacob Bielecki.
The past decade has seen the US lurch from one crisis, scandal, and national embarrassment to another. No one man caused all of these problems, but one man has instigated or exacerbated more of them than any other. Yet, that man didn’t win the presidency twice by mere accident, nor is he a force of nature. He became the president because voters chose him, despite a track record of unfitness stretching back over half a century and stacked as high as Mount Kilimanjaro. Tens of millions of people voted for him in 2016. Millions more voted for him in 2020, even in defeat. And in 2024, he won the popular vote for the first time. How does this anti-King Midas keep sticking around? Why does every blunder and transgression simply roll off of him? How did a reality TV carnival barker come to define a political era? The answer may be politically incorrect, but it’s the truth: American voters just aren’t that smart, and in Donald Trump, they’ve found an outlet for their grievances in a world they don’t understand.
Just look at what the average voter wants. They want taxes and prices to be low, wages to be high, and a European-style welfare state they refuse to pay for. This is patently absurd, but voters have nevertheless demanded these impossible goals and punished politicians who fail to achieve them for decades — and they show no signs of stopping. This isn’t all that surprising from an electorate that can barely read.
According to a 2022 Gallup report, 130 million Americans from the ages of 16 to 74 have “low literacy skills”, meaning they not only struggle to read and write at a basic level, they cannot comprehend or utilize the content they’ve read. Other reports on literacy in the United States found that 21 percent of adults are functionally illiterate, 54 percent read below a 6th-grade level, and 20 percent below a 5th-grade level. Immigration skews these numbers a bit, as 34 percent of the adults who lack basic literacy skills are foreign-born. However, that still means 66 percent of people who have poor literacy were born in the US.
At the same time, a large portion of these voters show signs of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). According to the Mayo Clinic, people with ODD are prone to anger, easily annoyed, defy and argue with authority figures, refuse to follow people’s requests, and deliberately upset others for their own pleasure. People with ODD are also incapable of taking responsibility for their actions and refuse to admit when they are wrong, instead blaming others for their actions. During angry episodes, they use hateful language and try to hurt other people’s feelings as revenge. A pattern of engaging in vindictive behavior is another telltale sign of ODD. The condition is most common in children, but ODD is estimated to affect 3.3 percent of the adult population — nearly nine million voting-age Americans. Those with ODD have an increased risk of antisocial behavior, impulse-control problems, substance abuse, anxiety, and depression when they become adults.
The toxic combination of a willfully ignorant public with antisocial tendencies has been a disaster for public health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans refused to follow any health guidelines, from social distancing to vaccination. Many either lacked the capacity to comprehend what was being asked of them or were outraged that they were being asked to do anything at all. Instead, they dove deeper into conspiracies being spread online. These Americans don’t like being told what to do, particularly when it comes from someone who they know is more educated than them. As a result, Americans died of COVID-19 at a much higher rate than citizens of other wealthy nations. Hundreds of thousands of easily preventable deaths occurred because Americans childishly refused to take even the most basic measures during a global pandemic.
In the time since, vaccination numbers in general have fallen. In 2019, childhood vaccination rates were at 95 percent — now it’s less than 93 percent. A 2024 Gallup poll found that only 69 percent of Americans believed that it was important for parents to have their children vaccinated. In 2001, that figure was 94 percent. Republicans account for almost all of this massive polling shift. As of this writing, there’s a measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico schools with more than 230 cases so far. Two people, including one child, have died. Given how highly contagious measles is, the number of unvaccinated children who have the illness is certainly higher.
It’s not just measles that’s spreading — whooping cough cases have spiked among children in Oklahoma, Louisiana (where two have died), and Washington state. Yet this rash of preventable outbreaks has not changed parents’ minds in the slightest. Not only hasn’t the anti-vaxx contingent shrunk, it’s grown more hostile and unapologetic. Kaleigh Brantner, a mother in Seminole, Texas whose son was infected with measles but recovered said, “We're not going to harm our children or risk the potential to harm our children so that we can save yours.” This is part of a broader trend. Since 2016, Americans have become more unhinged, spiteful, and vitriolic in general. They’ve become more like Donald Trump.
It has long been rumored that Donald Trump’s aversion to reading stems from a lack of reading skills. Like millions of Americans, he has refused to read virtually anything over the course of his life. If you’re reading this sentence, you have done more reading than the president of the United States or the average American has in months. Tony Schwartz, who ghost-wrote Trump’s 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, believes Trump has never read a book in his life, including the books that were ghost-written on his behalf. According to Michael Wolff’s reporting of the early days of the first Trump Administration in Fire and Fury (2018):
“He [Trump] didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
Trump apparently even struggles to pay attention or understand something when it’s explained to him. One of Trump’s campaign advisers, Sam Nunberg, tried to teach the president every amendment of the Constitution. This crash course in constitutional law — which no US president should need — didn’t go well. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment, before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.” Nunberg recalled. Again, Trump is no outlier here. Less than half of Americans can name the three branches of government. It was only a matter of time before they voted for someone similarly ignorant.
Shortly after Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live during the 2016 Presidential race, then-cast member Pete Davidson bluntly told the hosts of the Opie Radio show that Trump “doesn't really know how to read.” Trump asked to come up with his own dialogue because he could not understand the script, much to the amusement of the SNL staff who quickly realized they were dealing with what appeared to be an illiterate host. According to Davidson, Trump could not understand punctuation. While shooting a sketch with his daughter Ivanka, he was supposed to deliver the line, “Alright, let’s get out of here. Turkey legs?” Trump didn’t deliver the final line with the inflection of a question. Instead, he said, “Alright, let’s get out of here, turkey legs,” as if “turkey legs” was his daughter’s nickname.
Watch any interview with Donald Trump and you’ll not only notice his limited vocabulary and constant tangents, but also the recurring theme that no problem is ever his fault — it’s always someone else’s. When Trump is put in a situation where he has to answer for his mistakes, he lashes out, just like his voters. Though he has never been formally diagnosed, these are all symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder.
According to a 2016 Carnegie Mellon University study, most Presidential candidates speak at a 6th-to-7th grade level. Donald Trump spoke slightly below a 6th-grade level. The only other President who spoke at a lower level was George W. Bush. An analysis of Donald Trump’s vocabulary during the only debate he had with Vice President Kamala Harris revealed that he spoke like an eight-year-old, a drastic decline from even the low bar he set in past years. President Biden’s disastrous performance in the prior debate forced him to drop out due to public backlash, yet voters have never held Donald Trump to the same standard.
One example that helps illustrate the dynamic at play also occurred during Trump’s debate with Harris. Trump’s vocabulary briefly rose to 10th-grade level when talking about implementing tariffs. When Harris attacked Trump over his tariff policy, her vocabulary rose to a 12th-grade level. Her rebuttal, though backed by a large majority of economists, failed to resonate in part because most Americans found Trump easier to understand.
There are other consequences to having a willfully ignorant and defiant population besides them elevating one of their own to the White House. Since the 2016 election, the US has seen a growing divide between the voting preferences of the college educated and those without a degree, in which university graduates now mostly vote for the Democratic Party while those without a degree have coalesced around the Republican Party.
This realignment across educational lines has changed the make-up of both parties and how they operate. The Democrats used to be the party of the non-college working class, and their policy platform still reflects that despite hemorrhaging these voters. However, they also have to cater to a growing bloc of highly educated voters. The GOP, on the other hand, has not changed their economic policies to satisfy their newfound poorer, less-educated base and have trotted out the same agenda of tax cuts for the rich like they have for the last 40 plus years. What the Republican Party has done to keep these voters is pander to their right-wing views on immigration and culture wars.
Voting patterns have similarly shifted because of this educational realignment. Democrats do incredibly well in non-presidential election years because college-educated Americans still vote in these elections. Meanwhile, non-college Americans vote at much lower rates in midterms and the Republican Party suffers as a result. These voters only show up for one man — Donald Trump.
Of course, the US having a large swathe of uneducated voters is nothing new. During The Great Depression, a large portion of Americans had only completed elementary or middle school. Having a high school diploma was rare in those days, and a college degree was even rarer. However, these voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. They had plenty of reasons to do so. Millions of Americans did not have running water or electricity. The poverty rate was high and the absence of labor laws like minimum wage and the 40-hour work week created abusive working conditions. But that was a different time, when material concerns were paramount. Today, culture wars eat more into kitchen-table issues with every passing election. In 2025, the working class no longer wants “a chicken in every pot”, for all the noise about the cost of eggs. They increasingly want symbolic cultural victories. They want to “take their country back.”
Now Elon Musk is essentially running the government, firing government employees en masse and ending government programs. Air traffic controllers are being fired while planes are falling out of the sky, and children in Africa are dying because PEPFAR, a program blunting the spread of HIV/AIDS, has been halted. This is what Americans voted for. If you frequented Yahoo! News comment sections during the early 2010s like I did, you’ll realize immediately that what Elon Musk is doing to the federal government is exactly those commenters always wanted. They didn’t understand how the government functioned, nor did they care. All they wanted was indiscriminate spending cuts — except for Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending, which comprise the majority of the federal budget.
Why is Donald Trump still popular with voters? In part, it’s because Trump and his acolytes have utilized social media to build a cult of personality. However, another factor is that Donald Trump is the only politician they are capable of understanding. He speaks like an elementary school student — and so do they. He’s a sound bite president for a sound bite country. Meanwhile, the Democrats have leaned into esoteric and alienating academic jargon more concerned with in-group status signaling than appealing to the electorate.
What can Democrats do about this? It’s a difficult question to answer. We’re in an Idiocracy situation, where anti-intellectuals vastly outnumber the intellectually curious and where connecting with voters necessitates communicating at a middle-school level. For now, perhaps the best course of action is for the Dems to heed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s advice and drop the academic language, fix their optics, distance themselves from extremists, and try to meet voters where they’re at without sacrificing vulnerable groups. That’s easier said than done, and may not be enough even so, but at least it’s a constructive start.
See also: “‘The People’ Are Morons — But We Must Trust Them”
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It seems that 20% of folks are not quite best friends with the written word, while an impressive 53% are rocking their reading skills at a sixth-grade level or below—it's like a literary time warp!
I wish I could argue against this. I live in a fairly blue area, and I'm sick of the increasingly in-group behavior and language of the educated PMCs around me, treating the entirety of flyover country like the should be grateful for whatever neoliberalism gives to them and how DARE they not promptly adopt whatever culture-war virtue signal that all the Morally Correct people are using. There's a real gap in communication.
On the other hand...I know that IQ tests for voting would never work out or become a political football, but shouldn't people at least have SOME clue? Trillions spent in education, yet we're getting dumber. (So much for that Blue Tribe canard.) And meanwhile, the world is getting more and more complex. Where does this go? Some kind of new hierarchy (above/below the API)? Civilizational crash? World War III to hit the reset button? AGI to save us from ourselves (or wipe us all out; at this point, I'd take either)