Bret Devereaux

Of course it's true that voters across the political spectrum have always been pretty low information but I think esp. elderly and conservative voters are being absolutely assailed with crackpot stuff in a way and at a rate that's relatively new

A lot of what I hear about this is anecdotes like the above about people and their relatives, but I think studies about, e.g., what gets shared most widely and rapidly on Facebook bear me out

That's probably fair. I think what will be interesting is if it proves to be a useful strategy in the longterm. There are left-crackpots, but by and large, the party does not boost their signal the way you have Q-Anon supporters running for GOP office.

Obviously you have the gateway brain-melt of a certain 'news' station and talk-radio that feeds into that. But all of that, to some degree, is sustained by the political patronage of the party. What I wonder is if they don't reconsider if it gets them all unelected...

I mean, if we look at the timeline of the phenomenon, it doesn't seem to be associated with winning? Like, the last election where the GOP won a majority of, like, *voters* was the 2014 midterm? I think the oddity of the EC-win in 2016 despite the pop-vote failure obscures this

But the (for now) efficiently distributed voter-coalition wasn't part of a clever plan - it was an accident. Luck. And if it only swings the results by 2-3 points, that doesn't help if the crackpots cause a party to lose by 8 or 9.

Yeah in a very real sense this is a phenomenon that benefits the GOP only to the extent that they can control it, and by definition they cannot

See, I'm actually wondering the inverse of that. What if they *can* control it (by clamping down on the organs that produce it), but it does *not* benefit them (by pulling them to crazy-right and causing them to lose elections), but that they do not know that because 2016.