This is interesting:
Most citizens know little about politics. They are rationally ignorant. Because there is so little chance that your vote will be decisive (less than 1 in 100 million in a presidential election), there’s no incentive to acquire political knowledge if your only reason for doing so is to cast a better-informed vote in order to ensure that the “right” candidate wins. Numerous studies find, however, that swing voters – defined as those who are in the ideological center and don’t have any strong identification with either party – are among the most ignorant. For example, in my research using questions from the 2000 National Election Study, I found that self-identified “Independent-Independents” could on average correctly answer only 9.5 of 31 basic political knowledge questions, scoring much lower than self-described “strong Democrats” (15.4) and “strong Republicans” (18.7). Many other studies find similar results.
Thus, the voters who know the least are the ones who tend to determine electoral outcomes. Not exactly a comforting thought.
Why do swing voters tend to be so much more ignorant than the rest of the electorate? It’s tempting to assume that it’s because they are stupid. However, ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity. Even very smart people are inevitably ignorant about a great many things. Indeed, as noted above, for most voters political ignorance is actually quite rational.
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