I Had An Iranian Girlfriend
By 
One of the more durable findings of public opinion research in political science is that “don’t know” is almost always understated when you ask the public about most political facts because people don’t like to admit they don’t know. If you ask people to name the Chief Justice of the United States, a certain number of people are going to guess “Michael Jordan” or “Judge Wapner” because they’d rather not admit that they don’t have the slightest idea about something it seems like they should know. Here’s an especially egregious case:
Nearly 4-in-10 Republicans day they were familiar with Soleimani before his death; that group also overwhelmingly thinks the strike that killed him was carefully planned. https://t.co/Cs2hd1gIWb pic.twitter.com/EMG6uR1tTc— Philip Bump (@pbump) January 7, 2020
And 4 out of 10 Republicans on Tinder would love to pick you up in their new BMW but unfortunately it’s in the shop!
Put it this way. Only a minority of the public watches any TV news at all, and he was mentioned 7 times total among all major domestic news networks in 2018:
Mentions by TV network of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani during the last six months of 2019, according to Nexis:
—@CNN: 12 (9 on its international channel, usually not seen in U.S.).
—@Foxnews: 4.
—@MSNBC: O.
—@ABC: O.
—@CBSNews: O.
—@NBCNews: 0.— Paul Farhi (@farhip) January 5, 2020
If you asked Republicans if they were familiar with Iranian Major General Hitler Hussein Rodham Imabadguy before his recent assassination by Donald Trump I’d set the over/under for those who would claimed to have heard of him at about 80%.