A poll finds (pdf) that 22% of Americans think the healthcare bill has been repealed. Bernstein reminds us that the politically informed are in the minority:
[I]f you're reading this blog, odds are good that you're at least in the top 10% of all Americans in political knowledge, and more likely you're in the top 1%. And for those of us in that group, it's hard to imagine just how little the median American knows about the day-to-day events that we pay so much attention to.
Even when in some sort of abstract way it makes sense for people to know about politics or public affairs -- for example, it makes sense for Medicare recipients to know how ACA affects them -- they just don't. Sometimes that's because people aren't well-educated enough to feel comfortable reading or even watching the news (and the linked polling shows that college grads do much better on this question, although "some college" respondents actually are more likely to believe inaccurately that ACA has been repealed than are those with no college). But often it's because people have other, more immediate things in their lives to attend to, or they pay attention only occasionally, or they have low tolerance for conflict, or they just don't see any connection between things happening in Washington and their lives.
Ezra explains why this matters.