…why don’t we look at some data? In case you missed it (and you’re much better off if you have: firing squad! Form circle! Fire! Reload! FIRE!), the last few weeks the bloggysphere has been treated to the fucking ridonkulous spectacle a discussion of whether Ron Paul’s candidacy will broaden our political discourse about civil liberties and our imperial foreign policy. Well, I haven’t found any data about civil liberties, but the Pew Research Center recently conducted a poll examining knowledge about the GOP presidential candidates. One question asked if respondents knew that Paul was opposed to our involvement in Afghanistan. Drumroll, please:
Forty four percent doesn’t really seem like it’s expanding the discourse, especially when that’s lower than the percentage of people who know that Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts. Seems more like a lot of well-intentioned wishful thinking.
mikethemadbiologist
Score points for Republicans, though; they seem to be better informed.
I suppose; but that’s also attention triage there — it’d say questionable things about most Democratic voters if they were paying more attention to the Republican primary than the Republicans are!
“They’re all pretty indistinguishable, we’ll run against whoever we run against when the fall comes along” seems like a pretty sane approach if you have other things to do.