This column is about political burnout. You’re probably feeling it. You might be feeling it so acutely that you’re tempted to stop reading this sentence. But hear me out for a few paragraphs. Because this sense of exhaustion may be the defining feature of the 2024 presidential election cycle.
Iowa caucus turnout numbers were weak. Ratings for the cable news coverage of the results were soft. Two primary debates ahead of New Hampshire were canceled. And these trend lines aren’t going to suddenly turn around. The prospect of a rematch between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump is, for untold millions, the worst kind of rerun. In poll after poll, Americans are saying that they are underwhelmed by the 2024 candidates and unhappy about the political system as a whole. Some are terribly angry and motivated to vote (and door-knock and donate) but many are just tired.
So they’re “tuning out,” to borrow a phrase the Pew Research Center chose for the title of a recent report on the matter. Pew said these “Americans on the edge of politics” are “largely overlooked.” That’s true—and it needs to change. The Great Tune-Out has implications for campaigns, media outlets, and the greater political-industrial complex.
TheRighting founder Howard Polskin, who has been studying traffic to right-wing websites for more than five years, said he has been shocked by recent audience declines registered by right, left, and centrist news websites. “Major international conflicts, domestic strife, and the increasingly noisy Trump circus should have been audience magnets. Instead, traffic tanked,” Polskin says. “We may be seeing the effects of consumer news exhaustion colliding with the proliferation of Substacks, newsletters, and podcasts that now overpopulate the news ecosystem.”
The news, the noise, the nonsense—the information saturation is overwhelming. As one Democratic-leaning woman said in a focus group, “I feel like you can’t escape it,” referring to politics. “It’s like you cannot get away from it,” a Republican-leaning woman concurred. “It can really affect your mental health,” a Republican man said. These are the viewers who watched the NFL playoffs or the Emmys instead of cable coverage of the caucuses. (Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN had a combined 4.67 million viewers in prime time that night, down by nearly 4 million viewers compared to the caucuses in 2020.)
One of the Drudge Report’s top headlines the day after the caucus was titled “Sitting Out ’24?” Drudge linked to stories about “lower than expected” caucus turnout and a striking “lack of enthusiasm.” The next day, Stephen Colbert highlighted the low turnout—depending on the source, either 14 or 15% of the state’s registered Republicans showed up—and quipped, “so Trump won 51% of 14% of about a quarter of the population of one state out of 50.”
An obvious excuse was the frigid weather—but “snow doesn’t explain all that loss of interest,” former Republican House lawmaker Barbara Comstock wrote on X. Comstock, an outspoken Trump critic within her party, posted, “Trumpism is the politics of subtraction” because “Trump wins by depressing and shrinking the electorate.”
When Biden and his aides say democracy is on the ballot, they aren’t speaking rhetorically. Not only did Trump try to overturn the 2020 election, for which he’s been criminally charged, but he and his allies have radical plans to remake the government and seek retribution if they return to power. Trump even vowed to rule as a “dictator”—at least on day one of his administration.
And Trump, in not so subtle ways, exploits people’s disillusionment. He “is running against politics,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said on Iowa caucus night. “He is running against politicians. He is running against policy.” He is seeking to be a “strongman leader,” she said, and that’s what his biggest fans “like about him.”
I began to write a version of this column in my head when, in early December, I heard one of the country’s top political correspondents say that this cycle’s vibe was “LOL nothing matters.” (The reporter’s employer would not let her say so on the record.) As Trump steamrolled his rivals, despite (or because of) four criminal indictments, I tended to agree with the meme. I thought about it some more when I heard Peter Hamby, on Puck’s daily podcast, say, “Holy shit, man, this campaign has been so boring.” Hamby pointed out some downstream effects of an uninspiring and uncompetitive primary season, like a paucity of campaign reporter “stars” emerging, as has been the case in past election cycles.
“People, generally speaking, are tired of politics, and they’ve turned it off. They’ve tuned it out,” CNN anchor Kasie Hunt told me last week on Inside the Hive. “They find it to be demoralizing, frustrating, and just overall something that brings them down. So their answer has been to turn off the TV, to look away, to not pay attention.”
And yet political experts like Hunt are objectively right when they say that this is a supremely consequential election year for anyone who cares about climate change, reproductive rights, and the economy, to name a few of the many issues in play. It is tempting to say that an astonishing number of voters simply don’t care—but “caring” is the wrong word. When you have a headache, you care, but you may try to ignore it by taking two Tylenol. The 20-something who, just the other day, confidently told me that Trump is already behind bars, and the 40-something who earnestly asked me if Biden is really running for reelection, do care about their country, but they want the aching sensation to subside. They are practicing what scholars like to call “news avoidance.”
“Millions of people consistently avoid news,” and “many more are very infrequent news users,” according to a trio of professors, Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, who authored a new book on the subject. “News avoiders’ conviction that they cannot make a difference politically, and that news certainly will not help them do so, is the core of” why so many say they tune out, they write.