MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said low-information voters are being crowded out by "alternative reality voters" who make democracy exceedingly difficult.
The "Morning Joe" host worried that many votes were simply unreachable because they had chosen, as guest Anand Giridharadas said, to live "in a castle of fantasy" rather than engage with the facts necessary to sustain democratic governance.
"After 2016, there was a lot of hand-wringing by reporters, a lot of hand-wringing by people on TV, saying, 'We need to go out to the country, we need to get out of our bubbles, we need to understand the real world,'" Scarborough said, "and what I've seen over the past several years talking to my friends is, I'm sorry, it's just the opposite."
"Like they are not -- and I'm talking about my friends, I'm talking about people I love," he added. "I'm talking about people who have helped me with my children, that have helped me in my life when I'm at my lowest point, people that I love, they are not low-information voters. They are people who, as Anand said, have plugged into an alternate reality."
They're not just poorly informed, Scarborough said, they actively seek out erroneous information to support their preferred worldview.
"[They are] people who watch information and get a steady diet of information that is objectively false," Scarborough said. "That's the only way you can say it. They choose to go to sites on Facebook that spread conspiracy theories. The questions they ask me are extraordinary. When you talk about children in cages, they say, 'But, yeah, that was Nancy Pelosi who did that.' I said, have you not read that people were sitting around a table and they actually raised their hands and voted to cage children as a policy? 'No, that's not true, that's just the liberal press,' and I can say the same thing about coronavirus."
"Again, friends that I have known and loved for decades will be on the phone with me and they will say, 'Oh, COVID is no worse than the flu, it's just like the flu, despite the fact that Donald Trump admitted to [Bob] Woodward privately it's five times worse than the flu, at least," Scarborough added. "Every doctor they would go to would say that. They are not low-information voters, they are alternative reality voters, because they choose to go to websites that tell them lies. They choose to go to networks that tell them lies, that give them an alternative reality that they're comfortable with."
