You may think that Trump supporters are nitwits.

In fact that’s the word a Seattle Times columnist recently used to describe voters in his review of political scientists Christopher  H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels’ definitive new book, “Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government.”

Except that this columnist did not mean just Trump supporters. He meant most voters, even the sophisticated, engaged ones like you and me.

Oh oh.  Superiority threat alert.

Though Achen and Bartels don’t call voters “nitwits,” their findings put voters in an even worse light because they show that citizens behave in ways totally counter to the most prevalent theory about how democracy works.

They call this prevailing view, “the folk theory of democracy.”

This theory assumes that citizens are essentially rational actors who seek out candidates that match their policy preferences. These citizens are informed, watchful and open to wide varieties of information that they assess before deciding on a candidate.

It may be reassuring to you to distinguish between your rational, informed choices and your opponents’ emotional, ignorant ones. Do so at your own risk.

The success of democracy, then, relies on the wisdom of popular judgments by informed and engaged citizens. Even though we may fall short, the theory says, we have the potential for doing better.

This view is wrong in terms of behavior and wrong in terms of the potential to change.

In fact, as Achen and Bartels chronicle, most people pay little attention to politics. It is simply not an important part of their busy lives.

Voters are “myopic.” They make assumptions about candidates’ policy positions that are ill-formed.

A person commonly chooses a candidate he likes and then reframes this candidate’s policy position to be consistent with the citizen’s own beliefs. People seek out information that supports their own beliefs and ignore or denigrate other sources.

Voters have strongly held views on a few positions, but these views seldom cohere into an ideology. This is also the case for the politically partisan.

Elections are not determined by individual policy preferences but rather by something more vague, “the nature of the times,” and by groups with whom voters identify. These include some loyalties, like political party identification, that go back to childhood.

Most significantly, these traits are essentially intractable. Citizens pretty much share them regardless of their beliefs, education, sophistication and political engagement.

What do these distinctions between optimistic theory and pessimistic empirical reality say about Trump voters, as well as the rest of us?

Looking at Trump through the folk theory lens stresses the differences between him and more conventional candidates. It highlights his inconsistencies and erratic behavior as if those are problems for the voters. 

Trump’s policy views are, as one writer put it, “wisps of smoke coming into existence, curling into strange shapes, and disappearing within moments.”

But if you think about this in terms of the ways people actually make candidate choices, you focus on something entirely different.

From a Trump supporter’s standpoint, those here-today-gone-tomorrow wisps don’t make him a flawed candidate. They like him and as a result interpret information that puts him in a good light.

They do this because Trump speaks to their basic fears, their view of “the nature of the times.”  Everything else is secondary.

Trump supporters typically react to these supposed inconsistencies in three ways. They ignore them, reinterpret what Trump is saying to be consistent with their own views, or they claim that Trump’s critics are simply lying.

Trump supporters are certainly different. They tend to be whiter, more ethnocentric, more frightened of outsiders, and angrier. They are also more likely to be economically marginalized.  (One survey found that living in a trailer park was one of the most powerful correlates with Trump support.)

Not qualified for polite company. The word “nitwit” starts coming back to mind. But not so fast.

Trump voters may be more boisterous and blatant about this, but the process they use to reconcile their attitudes with the candidate they support is the same process that most citizens use in similar situations. 

We voters act this way to rationalize our choices. This “political rationalization,” write Achen and Bartels, “is often most powerful among politically well-informed and engaged people because their political commitments tend to be consistent and strongly held.”

As they put it, the historical record leaves little doubt that the highly educated have gone astray in their moral and political judgments as often as anyone else.

In the heat of the 2016 battle it is easy to stigmatize Trump and his minions. Why not? After all, many of you see him as a lying, authoritarian, sexist, phony demagogue whose presidency would be globally disastrous.

That’s the issue most at hand, as it should be, but let’s continue with this broader, longer-term conversation about democracy.

From that standpoint, stressing the differences between Trump voters and us is naïve because it suggests that only nitwits make decisions the way Trump supporters do.

In fact the processes that all voters use to make choices are deeply psychological. So as Achen and Bartels put it, using the folk theory of democracy as a moral standard is unfair because it is not humanly possible for most people to attain it.

It may be reassuring to you to distinguish between your rational, informed choices and your opponents’ emotional, ignorant ones. Do so at your own risk.

It’s a risk in two ways. First, that view misunderstands how you make your own choices. Second, it ignores a fundamental problem, which is the chasm between the way we think citizens are supposed to act in a democracy and the way they really do and are capable of doing.

Is there a realistic way to reconcile democracy with the ways people actually behave?

Achen and Bartels think there is, and they make an admittedly preliminary try at doing so. How they do it is for another time.

For now, just keep in mind that the intractable limits on effective popular sovereignty don’t come just from those whose politics you oppose. They also come from you.