The Smooth Brained American Voter

 Yglesias has one of his circle-jerk mailbags, where a bunch of chin stroking "pragmatic centrists" congratulate each other on their rigorous bothsidesing of politics. In particular, he nails Obama to the cross for moving left on things like the Keystone pipeline, immigration and campus sexual assault (how does one move "left" on campus sexual assault?), and that this is what cost Hillary Clinton election against Trump in 2016. 

First of all, winning three consecutive terms is hard. Second, Clinton won significantly more votes than Trump. Third, I remain convinced that in these highly polarized, tightly contested time, sexism is an underrated explanatory factor in Trump's two victories.

However, Elliott Morris may have the definitive answer. His analysis is about 2024, but I would be shocked if it didn't apply to 2016. What's more, I don't think it's incompatible with the latent sexism factor. The reason is that a massive swath of the American electorate is profoundly ignorant. Ignorant in terms of things like "Which party currently controls Congress?" When you can't distinguish between which party controls the Senate (or likely what the Senate even does), then you are left with vibe-based shorthand that reduce people to visual signals and broad feelings about the status quo. 

Yes, in October ten years ago, you had the media conflate the Access Hollywood tape with the endless stories about Clinton's email practices, making it seem like they were fundamentally the same story. Bothsides are corrupt! These broad brush strokes are enough to let people avoid the hard work of actually learning about how the political system works and what the parties actually stand for. It's far easier to notice that suddenly the barista has changed their gender and you find that weird and upsetting, so you vote for a rapist.

If you were to ask the median voter what the impact of tariffs are, they would be unable to provide a coherent answer, though they can see that prices have gone up and so they will vote for the other party. That might be enough to save democracy in the short run, but in the long run, we will always have to worry that some new Trump will come along and leverage the profound ignorance of the electorate to launch another attack on competent and just government.