The Trump coalition is a strange beast. There are the MAGA voters of course, the hard core racists, the fascists. There are the Fox News angry old people. There are the religious right nutcases. There are the tech bros who think democracy has run its course and now it’s time for something newer and better and AI based, and of course one that shovels even more of our money into their pockets. A subscription based high tech government where instead of voting you can click Like, and instead of paying taxes you just give them money and your smartphone keeps letting you buy things like food and shelter. But all those parts just don’t add up to a whole enough to elect a raving dumbass into the white house so they can get their hands on the levers of power. What you need is another piece that is, oddly enough, even bigger than all of those others put together.

You need the clueless. The oblivious. The ones that never start paying attention until just before the election. The ones that only watch the headline news, barely taking any of it in, because their favorite celebrity gossip show or reality TV comes on afterward. The ones that can seldom even motivate themselves to go vote but they will if there is nothing better to do that day.

There’s a whole lot of them and they can be easily manipulated by the skillful, the morally unconcerned, and the Russian. Especially in these days of commercial social media where you find lots of them spilling their guts about every little thing that interests them. Ever notice how those Facebook quizzes (Your Five Favorite TV Shows…The Top Things On Your Bucket List…) always start showing up in your feed more often close to an election? Where before you had to run surveys and host viewer panels to figure out how to manipulated them, now they show you all their buttons that you can push on Facebook and Twitter.

They’re proudly not political. They don’t want to hear it. Politics either bores them or makes them uncomfortable. So they avoid it.

These are the ones that can push your candidate over the top in a close election. But here’s the thing about those voters: you really don’t want them to start paying attention. Your candidate can screw them over and over and over and their general obliviousness still makes them easy to blame someone else for it and look the other way. Up to a point. Or as Abe Lincoln once said…

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

You really don’t want this generally oblivious subset America paying attention. Because when that start paying attention it’s almost always because they have become angry. And when it gets to that point, they will know who to be angry at.

One good way of getting their attention is taking their paychecks away.