How Voters Actually Vote - Spoiler, They Vote Unreasonably
Votes come from a complicated mix of reasons, usually reasons detached from real solutions to voters' problems.

The last few elections have shown how little policy has to do with American elections. Donald Trump’s campaign was light on serious policy in 2016, but his promise to go to war with the country’s elites put him in the White House. Biden’s promise to not be Trump won him the presidency in 2020. Kamala Harris’ first major policy speech wasn’t until a month into her 2024 presidential campaign.
All three candidates understood how to appeal to the intangible — and unreasonable — part of American minds. Voters choose their candidates by feel more than policy. Policy isn’t meaningless, but issues of identity and tribal affiliation are not just intertwined but dominant in voter choices.
Democracy for Realists unpacks the mix of unreasonable forces that drive Americans to different candidates. It’s a book-length academic study, but it doesn’t read like one. It’s a readable book full of data that will help any reader understand the lunacy of American elections.
Three Ingredients for American Votes
The authors of Democracy for Realists completed a study in 2006 that identified three weights that decide voters’ opinions:
“…First, background opinions representing what they already ‘know’ before encountering any specific information about an issue…; second, what they hear from party leaders and co-partisans or infer from their own partisanship; and third, actual factual knowledge regarding the matter at hand.”
Only one of those three pieces is fact-based. The two unreasonable pieces can have their own weights, and hard facts rarely outweigh folk knowledge or favorable political commentary. It’s frustrating to voters who want to have hope in the American electorate.
However, these three weights explain how a voter who’s raised to distrust anything the government touches can revere government institutions like the military, police, or fire department.
Self-described Independents are no better.
Few Independents Are Independent
Broadly, there are two types of Independents. A 2019 Pew Survey found that most Independents lean either Republican or Democratic. Independents don’t like the labels, but they fit them.
True Independents are mostly a sad story as the Democracy for Realists end their book explaining:
“Typically less-informed, they may fail to grasp what is at stake in the choice of one party or another, much less where their overall interests lie. Thus, they are often swept along by the familiarity of an incumbent, the charisma of a fresh challenger, or a sense that it is “time for a change,” even when the government did not cause the current unsatisfactory situation and cannot greatly alter it.”
One study of the 2016 election identified different voter segments who swung to Trump. One of them included a group the study termed the Disaffected, which the authors described this way:
“This group does not know much about politics, but what they do know is they feel detached from institutions and elites and are skeptical of immigration. The Disengaged are less loyal Republicans who largely came to vote for Trump in the general election. They skew younger, female, and they are religiously unaffiliated. They are not very politically informed and have limited knowledge of political facts.”
The Disaffected were only 5% of the Trump voters, but that segment doesn’t have to be large. In Democracy for Realists, the authors quote Philip Converse, a political scientist, on the implications of a small group of uninformed voters in a polarized environment:
“Not only is the electorate as a whole quite uninformed, but it is the least informed members within the electorate who seem to hold the critical balance of power, in the sense that alternations in governing party depend disproportionately on shifts in their sentiment.”
As a group, Independents aren’t intellectual mavericks who challenge their favored sides. If they’re not partisans, they’re usually voters who think Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are identical politicians. The Independents who are worth admiring intellectually are a minority within a minority.
The Role of Parties in an Uninformed Democracy
Voters may be uninformed, but liberal democracy is still the best system of government. The most prosperous societies across time were the ones that embraced toleration, kept open contact with other societies, and felt secure enough to allow ideas to clash and knowledge to flourish. Liberal democracy is the best system of government for creating those conditions.
However, the voters alone aren’t enough for a maximally functional democracy. Elected members of each party need to be able to play a role in selecting political leadership and influencing policy.
In parliamentary democracies, voters elect party members to office. Then the party will decide which of its members becomes prime minister. This allows voters to choose the platforms they want to support and party members can swap leaders if the person they elevated turns out to be a dud. It’d be like if Mitch McConnell could’ve led an effort to replace Trump with another Republican candidate during Trump’s presidency.
We don’t have to switch to a parliamentary democracy. A better solution for the United States would be to empower party members to take a more active role in selecting leaders. Fareed Zakaria suggested that empowering superdelegates who could vote how they choose could improve candidate selection without reverting to an undemocratic system of government.
The Democratic Party’s shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris was an example of the productive role that delegates and party leaders could play in selecting competitive candidates in future elections who are both electable and responsive to Americans’ needs. Each party member would still be accountable to their voters, but the parties wouldn’t have to wait for powerful personalities to take them over as Trump did to the Republicans.