I had an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence late last week. It taught me some things about where the “aver­age voter” might stand.

Those who fre­quent Log­a­rchism pay atten­tion to this stuff all the time. Some of us seem to have intra­venous feeds of CNN and CSPAN while we sleep. We assume the rest of the elec­torate is plugged in, too — maybe not to the extent we are, but enough to know the play­ers and the issues, the names and the costs.

Maybe that’s not true.

When we read polls, we assume peo­ple are mak­ing judge­ments based on their knowl­edge of facts, their aware­ness of his­tory, their con­cern for the pos­si­ble effects of pol­icy, and of what the politi­cians are say­ing about all that. In point of fact, polls may be telling us some­thing alto­gether different.

I recently had some work done on my house. The build­ing is older than I am, and that’s say­ing some­thing. I do most of the repairs myself, but this time, we hired a con­tract­ing com­pany to replace the sof­fits and fas­cia. (If you don’t know what that means, con­sider your­self fortunate.)

The two guys doing it were very pleas­ant young men in their early thir­ties. They’d been there for most of a week, and I fre­quently chat­ted with them after I got home from work and while they were pack­ing up for the day. On the last day of their project, we took a walk around the house for an inspec­tion, then com­pleted the paper­work while stand­ing by their truck.

I think one of them noticed the “Obama 2012″ bumper stick­ers my wife and I have on the backs of our cars. He asked, “So, do you think Rom­ney or Obama is going to win?”

I didn’t know where these young guys stood in a polit­i­cal sense, and I’d been extremely happy with their work, so I didn’t want to get into a poten­tial argu­ment. I diplo­mat­i­cally said that I didn’t think Rom­ney was a very good cam­paigner, and that he hadn’t been respond­ing effec­tively to some of the ads Obama had been putting out. So, I con­cluded, I thought it was likely Obama would get reëlected.

The two of them looked at each other. One said, “Well, I haven’t been pay­ing much atten­tion yet. Still a while ’till the elec­tion, right?”

I nod­ded. “Not until November.”

“Plenty of time to worry about it then.” He looked thought­ful. “Hey, didn’t Hillary take Obama’s old seat in Chicago? Obama used to be a sen­a­tor there, right?”

I was con­fused for a moment. “No, Hillary is now Sec­re­tary of State.”

I couldn’t be sure, but I’m not cer­tain either of them knew what “Sec­re­tary of State” means. Now, these are very bright guys. I’d spo­ken with them before. I’d seen them work out some really chal­leng­ing aspects of the repair job they did around my home. It’s a strange old house, with some odd cor­ners and unusual land­scap­ing. These are really smart guys.

He answered, “I’m sure some­one went to Chicago.”

A light dawned. He wasn’t talk­ing about Hillary, and he wasn’t talk­ing about Obama’s sen­ate seat. “Oh! You mean Rahm Emmanuel.”

Both the young guys gave me totally blank faces. Maybe they thought Rahm Emmanuel was a char­ac­ter from Star Wars.

I elab­o­rated. “He used to be Obama’s Chief of Staff.” Still no recog­ni­tion. I tried again. “Now he’s Mayor of Chicago.”

One of them bright­ened. “Yeah, like I said. I knew some­one took Obama’s old seat. Obama used to be a sen­a­tor there, right?”

I’m not cer­tain, but he seemed to see no real dif­fer­ence between Sen­a­tor from Illi­nois and Mayor of Chicago. After all, Chicago has some­thing to do with Illi­nois. Right?

So we started jok­ing about Chicago. A few days before, I’d told them that I grew up there. One of them had a stopover at O’Hare field a few years back, and he wanted to visit the city again some day. He asked if I knew any good restau­rants. I advised him check out the obser­va­tion deck at the top of Willis Tower (for­merly Sears Tower).

They’d heard of Rod Blago­je­vich and knew he’d given Obama’s old seat to some­one. They’d thought it had been Hillary. I sus­pect, thanks to me, they now under­stand it was Rahm. We agreed we all missed see­ing Rod on the news. He’d been great fun.

Why am I telling this story? Those of us here who write arti­cles, and those of us who com­ment on them, and our Gen­tle Read­ers who lurk and sel­dom (if ever) com­ment — we’re all polit­i­cal wonks. We love this stuff, and we pay atten­tion all the time. We’ve read the Con­sti­tu­tion, and I bet most of us could quote pas­sages from it. We (most of us, I bet) know what the Fed­er­al­ist Papers are, and the Arti­cles of Con­fed­er­a­tion. If we can’t name the first thir­teen states when asked, we’d at least have the good sense to be embar­rassed by it.

More: We can find Syria on a map. China, too. We at least know the order of mag­ni­tude of annual fed­eral spend­ing, the national debt, prob­a­bly the GDP. We know what “NASA” stands for, and that more Amer­i­can sol­diers were killed in Iraq than the num­ber of civil­ians who died in the attack on the World Trade Cen­ter. We can prob­a­bly name the last six pres­i­dents (prob­a­bly the last ten or fif­teen), in order, back­wards, with­out even think­ing about it. I admit­ted to these two pleas­ant young men that I’d been born while Eisen­hower was pres­i­dent, and pro­ceeded to name all the Amer­i­can heads of state since then — and it was quite a while before I chanced on a name they knew. They cer­tainly couldn’t name the guys who’d held that office since their births. They didn’t even know for sure who’d held the office in the early 1980s when they were born.

I sus­pect most Amer­i­cans don’t care all that much about any of this. It’s not that they’re une­d­u­cated, or stu­pid. I don’t want to give a false impres­sion. These two guys were really bright. Really, really smart. I’d chat­ted with them about a whole range of things. They are funny, clever, sharp, and — it must be said — pretty damn good look­ing, too (and I don’t even swing that way).

They just were a lot more inter­ested in foot­ball than in pol­i­tics. (Since I’d grown up in Chicago, one of them went on about want­ing to visit Sol­dier Field some day.) I would have been in a com­pa­ra­ble posi­tion if they’d started talk­ing about, say, hockey, or nearly any­thing con­nected with horserac­ing. Not my area, and I’m not really all that inter­ested in it.

They didn’t really seem to care much about the upcom­ing elec­tion. Plenty of time to think about it later. If a poll­ster had asked them who they were going to vote for, their pref­er­ence clearly would not have been based on any in-​​depth knowl­edge of the issues. It would have been like ask­ing my opin­ion on the upcom­ing curl­ing tour­ney. (Does curl­ing have tourneys?)

I sus­pect, for most peo­ple, an opin­ion on, say, Oba­macare is not based on any knowl­edge of what’s in the Patient Pro­tec­tion and Afford­able Care Act, but only on a dis­tant aware­ness of the term “Oba­macare” hav­ing been been used as a swear word. They fol­low cur­rent events no more closely than they fol­low a TV show they don’t watch. We who fol­low this stuff think that polls for or against some­thing mean that Amer­i­cans have an opin­ion about what’s in the thing, an opin­ion about the issues and the pol­i­tics and the argu­ments and facts that have been pre­sented for and against.

It isn’t that Amer­i­cans are unin­tel­li­gent. They are unin­formed. And, increas­ingly, they are dis­in­formed. They don’t much care about pol­i­tics, because they don’t see how it affects their daily lives.

Okay, I know that a sin­gle encounter with one pair of con­struc­tion con­trac­tors can’t — or at least, shouldn’t — be gen­er­al­ized to Amer­ica at large. But it brought me up short. Peo­ple tend to hang with other peo­ple who have sim­i­lar inter­ests, if not sim­i­lar opin­ions. We who care about pol­i­tics might think that oth­ers who vote are also at least mar­gin­ally informed con­cern­ing the issues.

I’m not sure that’s true. If I sud­denly was asked to vote for a final­ist on Amer­i­can Idol, and if I felt it was kind of my civic duty to do so, I might pick a name I’d heard. Or imag­ined I’d heard. Or one that sounded sexy. Or one the guys at work men­tioned. I don’t know any­thing about Amer­i­can Idol. I sus­pect a lot of vot­ers don’t know any­thing more about Afghanistan or the econ­omy or the debt ceil­ing or tax rates or health care.

Do politi­cians count on this lack of inter­est and lack of infor­ma­tion? If you were a polit­i­cal strate­gist, what would you do with this apa­thy? Would you try to inform peo­ple — or try to sim­ply build an image that would make Your Guy look good, and The Other Guy look bad? Do any actual facts mat­ter, given that a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of your con­sumers nei­ther know nor care about facts?

I recall hear­ing Everett Dirk­sen when I saw him in per­son, run­ning for re-​​election to the Sen­ate back in the 1960s — “I don’t talk about issues. Vot­ers don’t under­stand issues.” (He had a thick accent. It wasn’t “issues”. It was ishahs. It was also unnerrstan’.)

I’m vot­ing Ash­ton Kirtchly off the Island. Wait — didn’t she go to Chicago?

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