Longwell runs focus groups with voters. She says that when asked where they get their information, people increasingly answer "I don't know where I saw that." Politics now reaches them inside algorithmic feeds about sports and culture.
…and culture combines into something that is a deeply non-political science term, which we would call a vibe. And that vibe is what a lot of the low information voters are getting, something that washes over them, that is sort of algorithmically injected into the cultural things that they imbibe.
Say more about that. What changes in politics or what have you watched change in politics as it's become more, in your language here, vibe-oriented?
I think it's the big difference between news seekers and news receivers. I think we used to live in a world where you spent time with the news and it was a specific time. You sat down at the breakfast table and you read a newspaper, you watched the evening news, like you made sort of time for the news. And I just think that the news receiver means I didn't sit down to find something out. Information just washed over me and there was no mechanism to verify it. There was no, is this true? Does it even matter to me? I just, it just like flashes over them. And so they wake up with an opinion without any idea of how it was formed.
So I want to talk about something that seems to have begun breaking through. And I don't really know why it's finally breaking through now, but it is corruption. I want to play a clip from a Trump Voters Revealed about corruption and how it's sort of changed in his view.
I'm a Republican. I'm just saying he's front and center now, right? And he's just blatant with corruption. But like, we tolerated corruption in a way or look the other way. Even them, their own politicians look the other way at each other. But because it was more minimal or more obscure. Every now…
now. See this Fox News poll from October. Yeah. Asked voters how concerned they were about key issues. More expressed concern over corruption in government than any other issue. It came out higher in this Fox News poll than prices and healthcare, the war in Iran, and immigration. Why is corruption…