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Is there any evidence to think that paying attention to news improves voting decisions? Indeed, how do you even grade things like presidents to know if you made the right decision in retrospect?

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Even the concept of "improved voting decision" is all but impossible to evaluate. But on the other hand, studies have shown that people vote according to things like the state of the economy, I'd be interested to know how someone evaluated that (or if they care) without ever seeing/reading any news about it. Presumably just by looking at their own experience only.

The economist had an interesting write up of this past election. The found the single biggest determinant for how a county would vote was how sick that county was.

I can't even see how that would be correlated with the news.

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