New research on Trump voters: They're not the sharpest tools in the box
Now there's proof: Trump's voters lack "cognitive sophistication," often
believe Bible is literal word of God
By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published March 23, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)
Supporters gather at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the Canyon
Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022 in Florence, Arizona. The
rally marks Trump's first of the midterm election year with races for both
the U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona this year. (Mario Tama/Getty
Images)
Supporters gather at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the Canyon
Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022 in Florence, Arizona. The
rally marks Trump's first of the midterm election year with races for both
the U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona this year. (Mario Tama/Getty
Images)
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The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with
leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either
tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats, for
the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save
America's democracy from the rising neofascist tide.

American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and
slavery. This unresolved birth defect at the foundation of the American
democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by
design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present, American
politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in which
Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party's most
"moderate" members are far more extreme than the most "conservative"
Democrats. This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the
interests of the common good and the American people almost impossible.

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trump supporters and
Trump-loathers, increasingly do not live in the same neighborhoods or
communities. In all, they largely do not socialize with each other, or have
other forms of meaningful interpersonal relationships in day-to-day life.

To the degree that "race" is a proxy for political values and beliefs, the
color line functions as a practical dividing line of partisan identity and
voting. Religion is also a societal space that is divided by politics. For
example, public opinion research shows that white right-wing evangelical
Christians have increasingly embraced authoritarian views, conspiracy
theories and other anti-democratic and antisocial values.

As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College
highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular
democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that
religion should influence a person's political values, where as only 28% of
Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.

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Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not consume
the same sources of information about news and politics. Conservatives now
inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber, which functions as a
type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and sealed-off universe. The
creation of such an alternate reality is an important attribute of fascism,
in which truth itself must be destroyed and replaced with fantasies and
fictions in support of the leader and his movement.

America's struggle for democracy and freedom against authoritarianism is
taking place on a biological level as well. Social psychologists and other
researchers have shown that the brain structures of conservative-
authoritarians are different than those of more liberal and progressive
thinkers. The former are more fear-centered, emphasizing threats and
dangers (negativity bias), intolerant of ambiguity and inclined to simple,
binary solutions. Conservative-authoritarians are also strongly attracted
to moral hierarchy and social dominance behavior.

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Recent research by Darren Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern
Illinois University, demonstrates that America's democracy crisis may be
even more intractable than the above evidence suggests. In his recent
article "Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote," which
appeared in the January 2021 edition of Social Science Quarterly, Sherkat
examined data from the 2018 General Social Survey and concluded that there
are substantial negative differences between the thinking processes and
cognition of white Trump voters, as shown in the 2016 presidential
election, as compared to other voters who supported Hillary Clinton or
another candidate, or who did not vote at all.

Sherkat observes that Trump support has been linked to religion and level
of education, but until now not to "cognitive sophistication," which was
found "to have a positive effect on voting, but a negative effect on
choosing Trump." He notes that "philosophers and political elites have
debated the potential effects of mass political participation" for
generations, concerned "about the unsophisticated masses coming under the
sway of a demagogue." In effect, this debate was always about the quality
he calls cognitive sophistication, since citizens who lack it "may not be
able to understand and access reliable and valid information about
political issues and may be vulnerable to political propaganda":

Low levels of cognitive sophistication may lead people to embrace
simple cognitive shortcuts, like stereotypes and prejudices that were
amplified by the Trump campaign. Additionally, the simple linguistic style
presented by Trump may have appealed to voters with limited education and
cognitive sophistication. Beginning with [T.W.] Adorno's classic study of
the authoritarian personality, empirical works have linked low levels of
cognitive sophistication with right-wing orientations....

Trump's campaign may also have been more attractive to people with low
cognitive sophistication and a preference for low-effort information
processing because compared to other candidates Trump's speeches were given
at a much lower reading level�. While much of the Trump campaign's rhetoric
and orientation may have resonated with the poorly educated and cognitively
unsophisticated, those overlapping groups are less likely to register to
vote or to turn out in an election.

As part of his research, Sherkat evaluated the political decision-making
and cognition of Trump's voters, using a 10-point vocabulary exam. In a
guest essay at the website Down with Tyranny, he explains what this
vocabulary test revealed about white Trump voters:

Overall, the model predicts that almost 73% of respondents who missed
all 10 questions would vote for Trump (remember, that is controlling for
education and the other factors), while about 51% who were average on the
exam are expected to vote for Trump. Only 35% of people who had a perfect
score on the exam are predicted to be Trump supporters.

Notably, this very strong, significant effect of verbal ability can be
identified within educational groups. While non-college whites certainly
turned out more heavily for Trump, the smart ones did not � only 38% of
those with perfect scores are expected to go for Trump, and only 46% of
non-college graduates who scored a standard deviation above the mean. The
same is true for college graduates � low cognition college graduates were
more likely to vote for Trump. ...

What is really depressing isn't just the poles of the vocabulary exam,
it's the average. The mean and median of the scale is 6 � so half of white
Americans missed 4 of the easy vocabulary questions.

Sherkat's research also explored how religion impacted support for Donald
Trump among white voters: "This study confirms that white Americans with
fundamentalist views of the Bible and those who embrace identifications
with sectarian Protestant denominations tended to vote for Donald Trump in
the 2016 election."
"Hysteria and shame": P.J. O'Rourke on what Trump's presidency gave America
Progress Bar
00:04/ 02:27
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and wants to conquer America

Belief that the Bible is the literal "word of God" also impacted Trump
voting: "Viewing the Bible as a book of fables is also significantly
predictive of vote choice, with secular beliefs reducing the odds of a
Trump vote by 80 percent when compared to literalists, and reducing the
odds of a Trump vote by 52 percent when compared to respondents who view
the Bible as inspired by God."

In an email to Salon, Sherkat offered additional context and implication on
the relationship between white Christianity, American neofascism and
cognition:

The problem of the contemporary American fascist right is rooted in
education and information. And this problem is not simply about attainment
of some quantity of education, but of the quality and content of education,
how that leads generations of white Christian Americans to process
information about a wide range of issues. The segregation academies that
proliferated in the mid-1960s and accelerated in the 1970s have taught
millions of Americans a radically skewed version of American and world
history and encouraged a continued segregated society. The homeschooling
movement augmented this division, and further denigrated the value of
knowledge.

White fundamentalist Christians have always segmented their communities
from the rest of America, and even exert considerable control over public
educational institutions, particularly in rural areas and in the states
which embraced slavery. White fundamentalist Christians distrust mainstream
social institutions like education and print media, and they actively seek
to eliminate public education and to provide alternative sources of
information. As a result, people who identify with and participate in white
Christian denominations and who subscribe to fundamentalist beliefs have
substantial intellectual deficits that make them easy marks for a wide
variety of schemes � from financial fraud to conspiracy theories.

If you can't read the New York Times, you're going to believe whatever
you hear on talk radio or on television. It's simply impossible for people
with limited vocabularies and low levels of cognitive functioning to make
sense of the complex realities of the political world. And we now have a
population where for 55 years substantial fractions of white people have
gone to private fundamentalist Christian schools that leave them both
indoctrinated in Christian nationalism and ill-prepared to process any
additional information. Worse, we now have over a million children in a
given year who are homeschooled by parents who are uneducated white
fundamentalists � and that total has been pretty constant for three decades
since the homeschooling movement blossomed.

What does this mean for the present and future of American democracy in
this time of crisis? Sherkat cited the "disturbing ... influence of anti-
intellectualism on American public life," which lends "performative power
to ignorant elites":

Spouting off obvious untruths is no longer a mark of shame, because
even basic historical and contemporary truths are not recognized. We seem
to have a stable set of about 30% of Americans, 35% of white Americans, who
are oblivious to political realities and incapable and unwilling to come to
terms with any of our key social problems. The increasing control over
public education by right-wing fanatics is entrenching ignorance and
intellectual laziness in future generations. It does not bode well for the
future of American democracy.

Donald Trump and his movement did not create all these American
authoritarians and aspiring fascists. Such people have long been a feature
of American society. What Trump and the Republican-fascists and their
movement have accomplished in recent years is to empower and normalize a
dangerous set of antisocial, anti-human, retrograde and anti-democratic
values and beliefs.

Saving America's democracy will require a moral and political reckoning and
acts of critical self-reflection on a nationwide scale about the American
people's character and values, and about how their leaders and governing
institutions have failed them.

Changes in laws and institutions are necessary. But on their own, such
interventions will not stop the spread of fascism. A lasting remedy will
demand that the country's political, cultural, and educational institutions
be renewed, re-energized, and reimagined. The questions Americans must ask
themselves are simple yet enormous: Who are we? What are we to become? How
can we unite in defense of democracy, the common good and the general
welfare? Without real answers to those questions, there will be no
democratic renewal in the 21st century -- and fascism wins.