That's a generalization,people on this board delve deep into a variety of subjects depending on background.Collectively for the last 15 + yrs we could be considered a group.Look no further than the discussions/disagreements
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest OAM was generalizing to politics, perhaps even in a "What's the matter with Kansas" sense. Where if you really dug into a person's core beliefs, you might find that their choice of "Team Red" or "Team Blue" really didn't make a lot of sense. Where they might say they want one thing but vote a different way based on their gut or tribal affiliation. Because at the end of the day, your vote really doesn't matter, so it's not really important enough to dig deep into the details. Known as
rational ignorance.
Now, that's a different calculation than when an individual has to buy a car, or choose whether or not to take a job, or decide whether we want to relocate to a new city. In these cases, you have an enormous incentive to get the decision right, so it is worth careful consideration of all the relevant factors.
The AP and coaches' polls are more like the first. As long as you're not a significant outlier in the AP, nobody is going to even notice whether or not you voted. And I'm not sure, but isn't the coaches poll a secret ballot? And to honestly make the effort to watch a lot of games, for your ballot to be carefully constructed, is a LOT of work.
So what happens? The polls become a lot of groupthink. Team loses, you move them down and appropriate number of spots based on who they lost to. Team wins? You move them up beyond the teams that needed to be dropped for a loss, but you don't move them relative to other winning teams unless there's something absolutely newsworthy about their win.
At the end of the day, nobody penalizes you for a "bad" poll if your poll looks roughly like the others. And then we have a team like OSU, which was #2 but showing cracks in the armor, and they lose 49-20 to Purdue [and possibly rack up a few more losses] and we all lament about how the voters didn't know what they were doing but there are otherwise zero consequences.
As Tommy Lee Jones said in Men In Black, "An individual person is smart. People are dumb."