Will voters wake up by Election Day?
One of the memorable books I had to read in various political science courses in college was titled “It Seemed Like Nothing Happened” — a narrative-meets-textbook attempting to document the significant events of the 1970s.
The title is exactly what made it memorable to me. I remember my smug, 20-year-old brain thinking, as I was buying the book for a class, “If it seemed like nothing happened, then why write an entire book about it?”
Then, after realizing the substance of the book, there was another part of me that felt dissed, because of course the first decade I was alive was the decade the history geniuses decided was less meaningful! (There was actually a time in the ’90s, pre-9/11, when I and other colleagues of my generation lamented how relatively calm the world was during our lifetimes, which made what we were covering less consequential. With age comes wisdom, right?)
Obviously, the title was meant to be a tad tongue in cheek. Compared to the ’40s (world war), ’50s (massive growth, Korea, McCarthyism) and especially the ’60s (assassinations, Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, moon landing), the ’70s didn’t have the same cache to historians — yet.
For whatever reason, the ’70s, even with some 50 years of reflection, still has that “it seemed like nothing happen” vibe to it when you look at the decade through the prism of the entire 20th century. Certainly, other decades, whether from the point of view of the world or the point of view of just America, were home to far more consequential events.
But that decade’s comparative lack of world-shaking events doesn’t mean it lacked anything of consequence. And one of the more consequential aspects of the ’70s was the start of a notable trend of political disengagement. This was the decade in which voter turnout started on a new downward trajectory. This was the decade where voters began showing their disgust for the system by not participating.
Whether it was burnout from the activism and the wars of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, whether it was the economic malaise and sticky inflation that took hold in the ’70s, whether it was the perception that America was in retreat and losing its superpower status (see Saigon 1975) or whether it was cynicism born of government cover-ups in Watergate and Vietnam, there’s a clear line of disengagement from caring about politics beginning in the 1970s.
In hindsight, considering all that was happening in the world and in this country, it’s a bit disconcerting that Americans looked at the laundry list of national and international problems and, instead of engaging more with democracy to change the leaders or the trajectory, simply shrugged and got less involved.
I bring this up because of one of the more alarming results from our latest NBC News poll. We asked a question that we ask every election year — on a scale of 1-10, how interested are you in the upcoming election? And according to the results, we recorded the lowest level of interest in the election this decade. Fewer people picked “10” in this poll than in any presidential election year we’ve tested since 2004, with one brief exception early in 2012 that soon ticked back up.
Of course, as I’ve documented over the last few columns, it’s not surprising that so many voters have indicated disinterest in this election. The electorate desperately wants to change leaders, and yet both political parties offered up more of the same, so there’s logic to the electorate showing less interest in this election than it did in the first Joe Biden-Donald Trump matchup in 2020 or Trump’s race against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Ultimately, barring some event in the fall that resets the electorate’s mindset, it appears we are headed for a lower turnout election. That has its own consequences up and down the ballot, and it makes the third-party candidates — and the various idiosyncrasies of each battleground state — matter more than usual. When variance increases, so do the potential Electoral College outcomes.
What if this is a pocketbook election?
Sticking with the ’70s theme here, another thing that stands out from the poll is how much it matters how you ask economic questions.
We know the macro economy looks good, with low unemployment and an expanding GDP. But when voters were asked if this economy was working for them, that’s where they had some issues. Over 60% of voters say they are struggling to keep up with inflation.
During the Barack Obama years, the health of the economy was judged by the unemployment rate — and when it was above 8% for parts of 2012, we were reminded that no president had ever won re-election with an unemployment rate of 8% or higher. By November 2012, the rate ticked a few tenths of a percentage point below that mark, and Obama won re-election.
But these days, with an unemployment rate under 4%, the public is judging the health of the economy by the cost of goods and services. And when you look at it through the prism of cost, it’s really a very frustrating economy.
Try being a first-time homebuyer, with mortgage rates over 7% — the highest in a generation. Not only has your buying power been diminished thanks to higher interest rates (a direct result of inflation, as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates to combat inflation), but the higher interest rates have kept older homeowners from downsizing and selling their homes. Instead, older folks are keeping their lower-rate mortgages and not selling their current homes, shrinking the supply of available housing. So not only is it more expensive to borrow money for a house, it’s more expensive to buy any house because of the shrinking supply!
The point is, there are plenty of real-life facts to support the voter perception that they are struggling to simply keep afloat.
If this is a pocketbook election, I would not want to be Biden right now. When asking voters to judge Biden versus Trump on various issues and characteristics, one thing that jumps out is that voters, in general, view Trump as better able to handle the mechanics of the job more than Biden. Trump is seen as better on the border, better on the economy and better at handling a crisis (yes, even post-Covid).
Biden leads Trump on various personal character qualities, as well as the ability to bring the country together. In some ways, if Trump wins, he’ll have successfully convinced swing voters that likability and empathy do not matter. He’s the Col. Jessup candidate: “You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall — you need me on that wall,” the character from “A Few Good Men” says.
We shall see — Jessup did end up being taken into custody. After all, as the prosecutor says, the witness has rights!
Bottom line, this poll only reinforces the trends that I’ve been writing about these last few weeks. This will be a late-deciding electorate, thanks to voters who have decided to tune out an election they believe they already understand without needing any new information. I truly believe that most polling between now and October will tell us very little. We know what 90% of the electorate is going to do — it’s the last 10% of “swing” voters who either swing between the two parties or swing between voting and not voting who will decide this election.
And the lack of appeal of the top of the ticket, combined with the feeling among a number of voters that neither party has the answers on the economy or foreign policy, means Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could become a very powerful “none of the above” factor in deciding who exhausts their way to victory.
Remembering Bob Graham
Forgive the nostalgia this week, but I’d also thought I would take a minute to remember someone who came to relevance in the ’70s: the late Florida senator and governor Bob Graham.
I know the older we all get, the more we glorify the past, usually by forgetting the bad stuff and over-remembering the good stuff. But Graham’s passing last week is a reminder that we really used to send fewer narcissists to Congress and fewer megalomaniacs to office.
Graham won because he tried extra hard to represent as many Floridians as he could; he didn’t win elections by dividing Florida into red and blue camps, he won by trying to win 60% or more of the vote. I think we’ve always had two kinds of politicians. There are those who want to do whatever it takes to win, regardless of whether they are popular or not, with power mattering more than popularity — the just-win-50%-plus-1 candidates.
The other type of politician wants as many people as possible to like them, and usually that drives them to do more of what the majority wants, not less. These are the folks who want a 60% approval rating at all times.
What’s sad about eulogizing Graham right now is that his style of politics would not be rewarded in today’s political climate. He wasn’t a partisan at all — sure, he was a Democrat, but if you were a constituent of his growing up, you’d be forgiven if you forgot his party ID. Because first and foremost, Graham was a Floridian.
What made Graham an extraordinary public servant was his focus on the ordinary. Born into wealth, Graham never acted like someone who thought his station was anything more than luck of the genetic draw. He was taught that he had to earn his place in society and, politically, that meant trying to walk in the shoes of his constituents — and I mean literally walk in their shoes. He became famous for show “workdays,” in which he’d spend a day at work with various Floridians. Some were teachers, some were cops, some were sanitation workers, some were farmers, but all of them mattered to Graham.
Graham’s success as a swing-state Southern politician has many of us scratching our heads wondering how he never ended up on a national ticket. The most glaring “what if” from the 2000 election: What if Al Gore had selected Graham as his running mate? Would that have been enough to erase George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin in Florida, handing the presidency to Gore? We will never know.
But let’s realize why Graham never ended up on a national ticket. The press and political intelligentsia of the Democratic Party thought Graham was too boring or quirky (he loved his notebooks) to be on a national ticket.
The superficiality of our politics cost us a potential president or vice president who took public service, national security and U.S. intelligence very seriously and who thought the American government should be as idealistic in its actions as the public demanded.
I’ll simply close with Graham’s words during a presidential candidate interview in 2003 with The New York Times: “I have a reputation, that is not undeserved, as being more of an understated person, and I’m not easily aroused to fervent, some people would say charismatic, levels. But I think maybe what the American people want right now is someone who can give them a sense of steady leadership, as opposed to an emotional jolt.”
Some day this will be true. Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later.
This week on the Chuck ToddCast from NBC News, Mark Murray takes a deep dive into the latest polling.
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