Roughly eight years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump won a nominating contest in Nevada, after which the Republican boasted about the scope of his support in the state.
“We won the evangelicals, we won with young, we won with old, we won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated,” the future president said, adding, “I love the poorly educated.”
That quote came to mind reading the results of the latest national polling on voters, candidates, and media consumption. NBC News reported:
Supporters of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are sharply divided across all sorts of lines, including the sources they rely on to get their news, new data from the NBC News poll shows. Biden is the clear choice of voters who consume newspapers and national network news, while Trump does best among voters who don’t follow political news at all.
That’s not exactly the sort of thing that presidential candidates are going to brag about: The presumptive GOP nominee is faring well in national polling — by most measures, he’s narrowly leading the 2024 race — but he’s relying on support from voters who are disengaged from current events.
Or put another way, among Americans who aren’t familiar with what’s going on think Trump is terrific. From the NBC News report:
Biden holds an 11-point lead among traditional news consumers in a head-to-head presidential ballot test, with 52% support among that group to Trump’s 41%. But it’s basically a jump ball among digital media consumers, with Trump at 47% and Biden at 44%. And Trump has a major lead among those who don’t follow political news — 53% back him, and 27% back Biden.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the poll alongside Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt, said, “It’s almost comic. If you’re one of the remaining Americans who say you read a newspaper to get news, you are voting for Biden by 49 points.”
Note, McInturff wasn’t exaggerating for effect. On the contrary, he was being quite literal: Among voters who rely on newspapers, Biden leads Trump, 70% to 21% — a 49-point margin. Meanwhile, when voters are broken down by their media habits, he former president’s strongest constituency is those who don’t follow current events at all, with whom Trump enjoys a 26-point advantage.
Of course, this matters for a handful of reasons, none of which have anything to do with mockery. For example, this helps explain why the Republican lies uncontrollably: Trump tends to assume that his supporters will never hear about the truth, so he can get away with deceiving them.
But it’s also relevant to the extent that the trajectory of the 2024 race becomes harder to change when many of the presumptive GOP nominee’s supporters are disconnected from developments. In other words, you and I might see important developments and think, “That’s the sort of news that will cost Trump a lot votes.” But the more the former president relies on disengaged, low-information voters, the more we’re reminded that his support is likely to remain stable because his voters won’t learn about those developments. Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt told NBC News, “These are voters who have tuned out information, by and large, and they know who they are supporting, and they aren’t moving. … That’s why it’s hard to move this race based on actual news. They aren’t seeing it, and they don’t care.” Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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