Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Just Vote. You Don’t Need to Be Informed.

In general elections, voting for party rather than person is a good idea. There’s no need to be an expert.

October 10, 2018 at 10:30 AM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

Go for it.
Photographer: Darren Hauck/Getty

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I really enjoyed a conversation about voting sparked by HuffPost’s Ariel Edwards-Levy on Tuesday. According to one HuffPost/YouGov survey, she noted, older voters (those ages 65 and up) believe by a better than two-to-one margin that everyone should vote, while younger voters (those 18 through 29) say, by an equally decisive margin, that only well-informed citizens should vote. Political scientists took note.

And they were not happy with the youngs. Jason McDaniel of San Francisco State University said, “This is why I always try to puncture this particular myth that to be a voter requires being an ‘informed voter.’”