People who choose a candidate or a cause you disagree with. After all, in this view, ignoramus voters could only have made such poor decisions because they lacked the information to make the “right” choice.
Rush Limbaugh often calls supporters of President Barack Obama and other Democratic officeholders “low-information.” The conservative talker argues that the media – hopelessly tilted toward Democrats and liberal causes – is the source of making voters low-information in the first place, because they lack a conservative perspective.
He put in bluntly in a December 2012 segment of his radio show, just weeks after Obama won a second term. “A low-information voter is actually a high liberal information voter,” he intoned. “There just isn’t much room left for Plan B – deficits, economic matters, the country going to hell in a hand basket, even though there’s a shortage of hand baskets.”
But like any political barb, the low-information insult can be turned the other way. Liberal group Media Matters did just that in a January 2013 web posting, “25 Examples That Prove Rush Limbaugh Is A ‘Low Information' Radio Host.’’’ Evidence included Rush's circulation of a conspiracy theory that Obama “might dispense with elections”; his prediction just before the November balloting that “everything – except the polls – points to a [Mitt] Romney landslide”; and his refutation of the international scientific consensus on climate change: “The whole thing has been proven to be a hoax.”
The “low-information” term actually has a more academic lineage. Political scientist Samuel Popkin, who has also worked as pollster for several Democratic presidential candidates, came up with the “low-information” phrase in his 1991 book The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Popkin referred to cues picked up on voters when politicians try to look “normal” such as eating at a local barbecue joint or visiting a firing range in a gun-friendly state or district. In this view, voters make up their minds not on substantial information, like legislation sponsored or policy platforms, but because of staged photo-ops
