Leighninger is head of democracy innovation for the National Conference on Citizenship. Gifford is the founder and chief operating officer of ActiVote.
Many Americans aren’t confident about the choices they are making at the polls; as a result, some voters are making ill-informed decisions and others aren’t voting at all. In fact, roughly 50 percent of all the people who register never actually vote, and closer to 75 percent of those registered don’t vote in primaries and local elections. We would have higher turnout, and election results that better reflect what Americans want, if we put voters at the center of the process instead of treating them as the means to an end.
This was the overarching finding of the research on voter education we conducted this spring and summer. Our organizations, ActiVote and the National Conference on Citizenship’s Democracy Innovation Project, held focus groups and surveyed existing studies to find out if more customized, accessible, nonpartisan information would help voters. We asked focus group participants to use the ActiVote voter education tool, which allows people to compare how their policy views map with those of the candidates vying for their votes. The focus groups covered three different cohorts of voters: new voters, infrequent voters and “super voters.”
We had three more specific findings. First, voters don’t like to feel uninformed. “There are a lot of people that I vote for that I don't know who they are,” said one focus group participant. “I feel stupid every time I'm doing this.”
Theoretically, voters should be able to base their vote on what the candidates say they are going to do once in office, but voters have difficulty connecting their own policy views with candidate platforms. Another focus group participant said: “I realized how much I don’t know, especially about the bills and the policy kinds of questions. There's a lot of stuff going on, it's hard to keep track of.”
This is particularly true for local and state races. One focus group participant from Pennsylvania admitted, “The reason why I never vote locally is because I simply didn’t have the knowledge to do so.” Another Georgia participant stated: “ It takes so long to find the information that you do not have time to actually process the information.”
Many other studies have supported this finding. One example is the 100 Million Project about non-voting adults in America, which showed that voters do not have time to learn as much as they’d like about the candidates and the process. The more confidence voters have in the process and in the quality of their vote, the more likely they are to show up to the polls.
Second, voters are uncomfortable with the influence of partisanship on the information they receive. As one focus group participant put it, “The polarization that exists right now, it just feels very manipulating. Truth doesn’t seem to be the goal, right?” Many focus group participants talked about voting along party lines, or following the endorsements of organizations they support, as a fallback they were using to replace trusted, easily accessible information on candidates and issues.
When they saw a way to work through information together, the focus group participants recognized an opportunity to get past polarization. One participant felt, “The more people can delve into the issues and see where they really stand and see where candidates stand, the better. Hopefully that's helping people to understand it's not all about polarization. We can agree on some things.” Being able to see how their views compared with those of the candidates helped them focus more on values and policies and less on party.
Third, as people were better able to explore the information about issues and policies, they became more interested in voting on issues directly through opportunities like initiatives and referendums. Instead of “shoving Republicans or Democrats down our throats,” said one young voter, we should take an issue like infrastructure and say to people, “Look, our infrastructure needs help. Now you form your own opinion. How should the need be solved?”
This finding is supported by other research. Americans support practices and reforms that would give them a more meaningful say in public decisions. In one national opinion poll, Americans were asked about a list of possibilities for participatory democracy. Support for these ideas — including processes like participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies, which allow everyday people to contribute to policymaking — ranged from 75 percent to almost 90 percent, without significant differences between Republicans and Democrats.
Voting should not make people feel stupid — it should make Americans feel informed, connected and empowered. By providing more information, better ways to process that information and more opportunities to be heard on policy issues, we improve the way we elect candidates and make public decisions. If we want government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” we should spend more time and effort focusing on the people.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.