By Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee)

The 2020 Democratic primary is the most polled primary in history, with many vendors releasing weekly or even daily updates to their polling. It has become increasingly clear that different polls have different “house effects,” with Morning Consult for instance being much more bullish on Biden and YouGov much more bullish on Warren. These differences are being driven at least partially by the attentiveness of the panel. Those who report following news most of the time have different preferences than those who do not. As voters’ attention to the news will change over the course of the primary, this has important implications for the decisions candidates will make as the primaries draw near. One important question is how much high and low interest voters different in ways that are relevant to support. It is possible that interest is a proxy for another variable, like education or age. We begin to answer those questions here.

In a recent YouGov Blue survey provided to Data for Progress (see the note at the bottom of this post), Democratic voters were asked,

Some people seem to follow what's going on in government and public affairs most of the time, whether there's an election going on or not. Others aren't that interested. Would you say you follow what's going on in government and public affairs

<1> Most of the time

<2> Some of the time

<3> Only now and then

<3> Hardly at all

<4> Don’t know

In a survey of likely Democratic primary and caucus voters, it probably isn’t surprising that respondents report being more engaged than do voters in other kinds of samples. Here, fully 65 percent of voters reported they followed the news most of the time, 25 percent some of the time, and the rest split among the last few options. Because attention to the news is so high, here we will mostly focus on voters who report they follow the news “most of the time” compared to the rest.

For example, voters who report they pay a lot of attention to the news also report being enthusiastic about other activities like voting. Among voters who follow news “most of the time,” about 63 percent reported they were “more enthusiastic” about this election compared to past elections, compared to only about 45 percent of other voters. (Notably, across most any subset of voters in this sample, “more enthusiastic” was selected significantly more often than “about as enthusiastic,” with barely any reporting they were “less enthusiastic” about this election compared to past elections.)