So the ad placers don’t realize that there are channels that lots of people in their target demographics view so they don’t buy ad time on them? This seems odd to me. I’d think you’d run ads that you want lots of people to see.
Most places. But not in Iowa in an election year.
WA has a caucus, and almost nobody I know is aware that exists. We also have a primary which is strictly advisory to the caucus and has no bearing on how delegates are awarded.
I attended one.
Not knowing what a caucus is is a completely separate thing from never hearing the word before.
I guess some people *here *are not aware of the difference in magnitude between “The Iowa Caucus” and “the [some other state’s name here] caucus”.
Because it’s not the Iowa Caucus.
It’s the word. “Have you ever caucused?” is different than, “Hey, are you aware that presidential candidates are running around Iowa right now looking for support?” I’m not surprised if some significant subset of the population is confused by the former; just about everyone will be at least tangentially aware of the latter.
You may be right. I hope so! The NPR reporters should have done some followup to try to establish whether this is the case.
ETA: It’s still weird for Iowans to have never even *heard *the word “caucus”, as opposed to just being unclear on what exactly it is or how it works.
I think there’s also the freeze factor. Point a camera at somebody and ask them what their middle name is and a significant portion won’t be able to answer the question. Some people just can’t think when they know there’s attention focused on them.
People in this country will tell tales of canvassing voters who claim not to know there’s an election going on, and even saying they can’t go to vote on Thursday, but maybe next week,
That’s not quite correct.
In 2016, the Republicans will use the primary to allocate their delegates. For the past several cycles they’ve switched between using caucuses only and using a split between the caucuses and the primary.
The Democrats use caucuses.
But again, the candidates don’t tend to come here - there aren’t several months of news cycles about the Washington caucus/primary (both local and national). There aren’t unending ads about the upcoming election-y things for four months straight prior to the dates. It’s understandable that someone wouldn’t know that there’s a caucus here. In Iowa, they’re inundated with news about the caucuses. I can see not going or not understanding how they work (caucuses are weird) - but I can’t see not having heard of them at all.
So, we don’t know anything about the background of these ignorant people – whether they moved there last week or have been there all their lives?
This.
From the rest of the article:
That was the summary I was quoting.
Here’s the source. It categorizes them as “Below Basic”. Not necessarily people who literally can’t read anything, but people who can’t effectively function with the written word.
See, that doesn’t surprise me at all. They aren’t even going to go after someone who is a recent immigrant, and recent immigrants are isolated by language and culture.
I could also picture some people who live out in the boonies with few if any neighbors never seeing anyone, if they’re the type that don’t go to town too often and throw away junk mail.
Except an NPR political reporter ran across them.
Wow, now that’s how you do it - distract everyone with a fake primary while the real work is done in a caucus.