The Fix: You will never go wrong assuming people don’t know much about politics. Never.

The overriding message? People don't know so much about current affairs with political tinge. Here are two examples.

1. The Senate

Presented with four options about the current partisan makeup of the Senate, roughly half (52 percent) got the answer right. (It's option number 4 above. Duh.)

Pretty good, right? Not so much. Consider that a straight-up guess would give you a 25 percent success rate since Pew provided four options for people to choose from.  Given that, you'd (or maybe I'd) expect a lot more people to get it right. What did the 48 percent who got it wrong choose? One in five people (21 percent) said that Republicans controlled 61 seats while one in ten thought Democrats held the Senate majority (option #3).  Six percent said the Senate was tied 50-50.

2. Elizabeth Warren

Again, roughly half (51 percent) of those who participated in the news quiz knew that Warren was the woman pictured on the lower left above. Ok, so, yes, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin (top right) does look a little bit like Warren. But, Nancy Pelosi (bottom right but you already knew that) looks nothing like Warren. And, even if you have no idea who Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) is (top left), she still looks NOTHING like Warren.

But wait, there's more! Of the 12 questions in the Pew quiz, three out of the four people got wrong the most dealt with politics.

Half of people have no idea who leads the Supreme Court.  Eight percent believe it's Thurgood Marshall who a) was never the chief justice and b) has been deceased since 1993.  Four percent of people named Harry Reid, who is a senator not a Supreme Court justice.

The takeaway from all of this? Assuming -- as lots and lots of people who either live in D.C. or follow politics closely do -- that the average person is a deeply-informed consumer of political news is not even close to right. For most people, politics is something that almost never intersects with their daily lives and which they spend zero mind space on day in and day out.

That makes breaking through to them -- on anything remotely political -- a challenge for any politician and those of us, like me, who cover this stuff. How do you reach people who don't even know who you are?

Chris Cillizza writes “The Fix,” a politics blog for the Washington Post. He also covers the White House.