Imagine going through life this way.
Sleepy Joe
Throughout Election Day and into that fateful night, Americans seemed mighty confused that Joe Biden was no longer on the ballot.
Data from Google Trends shows that the search query “Did Joe Biden drop out?” spiked in the United States on November 6 — despite the outgoing president dropping out nearly five months ago and endorsing vice president Kamala Harris, who ended up unsuccessfully helming the ticket.
Incredibly, there also seemed to be a spike in searches for “where to vote for Biden,” suggesting that many voters are genuinely clueless about the electoral process.
Initially, those sorts of queries were the butt of jokes on Elon Musk’s X-formerly-Twitter — but as it became clear that Donald Trump had once again won a presidential election, they seemed to indicate something darker.
“I am both terrified and envious of this person,” ESPN writer Paolo Ugetti tweeted.
“Imagine knowing peace,” quipped another user.
Mind the Gap
Jokes aside, perhaps the biggest takeaway from this seemingly massive information gap is just how common this sort of ignorance can be.
“The information bubbles are not liberal vs. conservative,” tweeted nonprofit organizer Tami Forman. “They are paying attention vs. not paying attention.”
“Those of us paying attention,” she continued, “would do well to remember that.”
While it’s far too soon to tell how outsize a role these sorts of disengaged or “low-information” voters played in Trump’s win, polls and analyses from before Biden dropped out indicated that the infamous GOP nominee was more popular among that set than the current president.
Beyond partisanship, however, these sorts of searches also indicate something perhaps even more alarming: that lots of people are unaware of what many online types consider common knowledge.
This not only leads to disengagement at the polls, but opens the door for the kinds of misinformation and discord that were hallmarks of both election cycles that ultimately ushered Trump into the White House. In other words, buckle up.
More on political numbskulls: Elon Musk Has Been Throwing Tens of Millions of Dollars at Republicans for Way Longer Than We Thought
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