For those who follow politics on a daily basis it can be absolutely maddening trying to comprehend why current polling suggests the public is essentially evenly split on the question of reelecting Donald Trump. This is particularly irksome given that Trump now routinely continues to excavate stunningly new depths of depravity in his speech and behavior that, as in 2016, should easily disqualify any other candidate from consideration.
But rather than wallowing in despair and exasperation at this seemingly sclerotic state of public opinion, it is useful—even essential—to keep something in mind: Right now, very few voters are paying attention. Not only are they not paying attention to political news, they aren’t paying attention to much news at all.
The folks who habitually click on The New York Times to see the morning’s headlines are outliers. The folks that log onto deeply political sites like Daily Kos—or conversely, the Daily Wire—are extreme outliers. Most people in this country and elsewhere now receive their information by glancing at their phones and picking up a headline or two from their home screens—notifications that only appear thanks to an algorithmic function of their past search history and interests. They may not know who the speaker of the House of Representatives is, or even who controls the House. They may not know where Ukraine is. They probably don’t know the name of their congressperson. But they may know when it’s the best time to plant tulips.
As explained by Matt Robison, writing for Washington Monthly, “Absorbing a lot of politics is not a reflection of intelligence or virtue but rather a reflection of priorities.” It just so happens that the priorities of anyone reading this right now are probably wrapped up in the nation’s politics. But those are not the priorities held by the vast majority of Americans. Whether they should or should not be is beside the point: the fact is, they aren’t, at least until an election is looming in their faces.
Robison notes:
According to studies conducted by pollster Ian Smith, up until a couple of months before an election, “people spend as little as ten minutes a week absorbing political news.” That’s 0.1 percent of voters’ time, about the same amount they spend brushing their teeth.
And, as we all know, some people even spend less time brushing their teeth than others.
Robison interviewed Ian Smith, director of polling and analytics at The Hub project, who helps to put this often-overlooked phenomenon into context:
The ten-minute-per-week figure is why, according to Ian Smith, the news event that Americans heard about the most last year—a year that included the first indictment of a former president, the rare ousting of a House speaker amidst worsening Republican dysfunction, and gruesome wars in Ukraine and the Middle East—was actually the Chinese spy balloon.
Yet the odds are that, prior to reading the above paragraph, the amount of time any reader of this page spent thinking about the Chinese spy balloon over the past month—or even the past six months—is close to zero. And yet, as Smith notes, it was the balloon story—much like the intensely publicized human interest story of the submersible sub that imploded underwater last year—that dominated the news. These stories entered the public consciousness because they were novel, and breathlessly covered (for a handy profit) by news outlets. On the other hand, Kevin McCarthy’s excruciating ascension to his short-lived House speakership—which took 15 rounds of voting over four days—was of no particular interest except to that tiny segment of the population that tracks all things political.
We see the same thing when it comes to Donald Trump. As Robison notes:
Why is Trump thriving politically despite his crimes? According to a YouGov poll taken six weeks ago, only half the country is aware that the court cases exist. Just 55 percent heard that he was found liable for sexual assault. Only 47 percent knew he was sued for fraudulently inflating the value of his properties. (Since the poll was taken, a judge found Trump liable for fraud, and he has been fined $450 million.)
According to Robison, what is happening here—much to the frustration of those of us who obsess over Trump’s daily antics—is that the American people are simply otherwise occupied, living their lives. They’re attending their kids’ soccer games, doing yard work, or figuring out the dinner budget. They’re sharing their social outings on Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram. They’re not following the latest economic trends and they don’t know what the economic indicators or consumer price indexes are showing.
In short, they’re not arriving at conclusions or opinions when it comes to anything that entails prolonged, repetitive digestion of news. They have next to zero knowledge of Trump’s “Project 2025,” or how the Supreme Court plans to alter our form of government to favor corporate polluters.
Obviously, that’s in large part the fault of a media establishment that is now essentially curated to satisfy peoples’ preferences. Right now the bulk of the American public doesn’t see the urgency of an election that’s seven months away, even if the stakes of that election are staggeringly high. They don’t even know what the stakes are, so in their minds there isn’t any reason for them to pay close attention. Yet.
None of this should be particularly surprising. As Sara Fischer, writing for Axios, pointed out last month, “Engagement with political news and news generally is down considerably compared to the last presidential primary election cycle, as Americans continue to funnel their attention toward lighter topics, like sports and entertainment.”
But, as Fischer notes, the last “presidential primary election cycle” took place while the country still in the midst of a global pandemic, with the nation often glued to their TV screens and news internet feeds. That drove an intensity of voter interest and engagement in large part because Americans felt that their economic and social lives were literally at stake.
That urgency no longer exists, and Americans, for the most part, have apparently reverted to their prior default state of general inattentiveness until the election actually rolls around.
The good news, as Robison points out, is that all of this is soon going to change. That is why we have campaigns. Beginning in the next few months, voters are going to bombarded with the news that Trump wants their local police forces to spend their limited resources rounding up 10 million people and forcing them into detention camps.
They will learn, over and over again, that he is planning on decimating the same federal government that sends them their Social Security checks, transforming it into a theocratic trough for unchecked corporate greed and institutionalized discrimination.
They will have very clear reminders, beamed into their homes and their internet feeds day after day, about Trump’s catastrophic mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, among many other examples of his proven, glaring incompetence and corruption.
By that time they will know exactly how many crimes Trump’s been charged with—his hush-money trial will have run its course—and what those crimes are, because they’ll be unable to avoid the onslaught of a billion-dollar media campaign specifically crafted to tell them that. And they’ll know he has vowed on “Day One” to let people who were jailed for “the most documented act of political violence in history” back into society.
They will also be exposed—over and over again—to the personal stories of women who have been victimized and harmed as a result of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and his erasure of their reproductive rights. If Trump thinks he can refute the power of those testimonials in the voter-rich suburbs of America by braying about an immigrant threat that he himself exacerbated, he is welcome to try.
If there is one lesson to take away from last week’s otherwise relatively obscure statehouse race in Alabama, it’s that when voters are suddenly hit with new information that startles or upsets them, they can and will react in a big way. The American electorate is just not at that point yet.
Much of the country is still waiting for the vestiges of winter to end. They’re not tuned in to anything but the prospect of spending more time outdoors and a total solar eclipse.
But assuming the Biden campaign does its job and takes full advantage of its starkly obvious opportunities, that electorate will be paying close attention when it needs to. As Robison notes, that may not be most satisfying or reassuring explanation for the tentative movements we see in the national polls, but, as he points out, “it can help us all avoid sweating the small stuff.“
President Joe Biden is running essentially even in the run-up to an election that is seven long months away. In such a polarized political environment that is not a bad position for an incumbent president to be in, just as their campaign gets off the ground. Rather, it’s a starting point to build on, a point of departure that begins with the efforts of people who are already tuned in and informed, those who fully understand the stakes right now.
That would be all of us.