You and I are saying about the same thing.
Average is not smart, its average, with about 50% of the degree of understanding that the upper 5% posess.
Politics is all about communicating to that lump in the middle.
Yes, I was just quibbling about the absolute numbers involved. The vast numbers are what make mistaken notions seem correct—normative behavior.
Also, not only do they not understand the issues, they are not political. They think they are, when a presidential election comes along, but that is only a surge of interest generated by the fact that it is the biggest news story. They haven’t a glimmer of what intelligent and political people think about day and night.
At a seminar I went to several years ago, the guy drew a picture on that large flip pad that they use. It was of two heads. He drew a huge circle in one of them that almost filled the whole head. “This is the amount of your brain that is devoted to politics,” he said. The he drew a little tiny circle in the other head, and said, “And this is everybody else.”