WASHINGTON — When most politicians ask for your vote, they often say something about how they put their faith in the wisdom of the American people.

But most American voters … don’t.

A new poll from the Pew Research Center finds that six-in-ten Americans say they don’t have much faith in the public to make wise decisions when it comes to politics.

That’s not exactly new. A Pew poll in March of 2018 found a similar number, and confidence in the political wisdom of the public has mostly been on the decline since the mid-1990s. The last time the survey found a majority of Americans feeling upbeat about the decision-making of their fellow voters was in January of 2007, after Democrats walloped the party of a deeply unpopular George W. Bush in the 2006 midterm elections.

But what might be most surprising is how the two parties have shifted since the 2016 election.

While Republicans and Democrats were generally aligned in their declining faith in the public’s political savvy between 1997 and March of 2016, Trump’s election prompted a skyrocketing of confidence in the public from GOP voters, who witnessed the stunning victory of their once-dismissed nominee.

Between March 2016 and March 2018, Republicans who said they had confidence in the public’s political smarts jumped from 35 percent to 54 percent.

Democrats, interestingly, didn’t see a dramatic corresponding decline in confidence over the same period of time.

The latest poll out today from Pew, though, finds that the GOP’s newfound enthusiasm for the prudence of America’s voters has waned since the 2018 midterms. In the wake of an election that gave House Democrats their biggest victory since Watergate, Republicans’ faith in their fellow voters fell back to Earth — at 43 percent.