Rob, there’s nothing intellectually lazy about using experience, because unless you use experience, it isn’t very valuable. Experience is intellectual efficiency.
Bear in mind that political science studies seem to have a philosophical core assumption that a well informed voter is the goal. Everything is relative to that. A voter strategy of purposefully ignoring the entire election campaign and simply voting at the last moment for the most moral or smartest candidate seems to me to be just as viable.
And why? A candidate with what appears as a pretty solid moral foundation will tend to make moral decisions if elected and is probably going to vector into an agreeable direction. A candidate with a major league IQ is likely to do smart things. We’re talking vector, i.e. what’s the likely direction a response to an emergency or new issue will take.
As such I’d be willing to bet that voting strategies that are based on vector and not personalities or “deep understanding of the current issues” are just as viable — if not moreso. Of course, I’ll probably be laughed at by political science people and psychologists and sociologists (or any of the rest of the soft science types) for saying this because among other things (e.g. shallow and stupid) it’s counter to the notion of the presumed (given) utility of the well informed voter.