IS IT OVER YET?
After nearly 600 days of the presidential campaign, many Americans have just had enough
If all you wanted to do was kick back in Fort Myers, Fla., and watch game four of the World Series, good luck. Twenty-two minutes into the pre-game show, a Donald Trump ad promised to lower health care costs. Twelve minutes later, a Hillary Clinton spot showed Trump mocking a disabled reporter. And then, deep into the game, another Clinton ad likened Trump to famous bullies from movies such as Back to the Future and The Karate Kid.
Americans have had it. It might seem funny — and heaven knows comedians and political cartoonists have had a field day with it — but election exhaustion is real. It appears to have shown up in everything from psychiatrists’ couches to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. A Pew Re- search Center survey found that about six in 10 Americans felt exhausted by the amount of election coverage — and that was way back in early summer, before Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape and Anthony Weiner’s sexting further complicated things.
The singer Sheryl Crow started a Change.org petition to shorten the election cycle. “By the time Americans go to the polls on November 8th, this Presidential campaign will have run over 600 days, kicking off with Ted Cruz’s announcement in March of 2015,” the petition says. More than 55,000 people have signed on, and stars Bette Midler and Courteney Cox have tweeted their support.
There are even Web browser extensions that will block election news. One is called, simply,
Remove All Politics from Facebook. And there’s I Haven’t Got Time for the ’Paign.
Another, called Social Fixer, can be used to filter out many things on social media, and developer Matt Kruse says the political filter is the most popular among his 300,000 users right now. “I expect political fatigue to last for quite some time,” he says. “One of the key features is that I update the filters in the background, so as new political terms come up in the news, users don’t have to do anything to continue having them filtered.”
The ugliness of the campaign certainly gets part of the blame for ramping up anxiety and fatigue — an American Psychological Association survey says more than half of adults say the election is a significant source of stress — but the very length of it has also turned people off. It’s like Christmas decorations going up at Walmart in mid-July.
And it seems endless, always tripping ahead: Nearly half of likely Florida voters say Sen. Marco Rubio’s re-election campaign is more about setting up another presidential bid in 2020 than serving the state, according to a Bloomberg poll. Even 28% who support him say that.
One downward-cycle result: While more people just throw up their hands, only the most committed are still yelling, and yelling ever more loudly to reach those who are turned off, thus turning off more people who really just want to watch two long-time losers playing joyfully in the World Series. “People who are highly partisan are more likely to be interested in politics and they’re less likely to be tired of it,” says Tom Hollihan, political communications professor at the University of Southern California. “People who are not so politically engaged, I’m sure they’re exhausted by the conversation, and they’re not actively seeking information at this point.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. A chart comparing the length of U.S. elections to others makes ours look like a triathlon compared to light workouts.
Many people are exhausted from trying, for so long, to be on their best behavior to avoid inadvertently inciting political arguments, says Rockville, Md.-based psychologist Mary Alvord. “There is a lot of tiptoeing around,” she says.
And we are tiptoeing at home, work, kids’ soccer games, social events and more.
“The story has permeated every aspect of our life,” says Vaile Wright, a clinical psychologist and director of research and special projects at the American Psychological Association. “You can’t get away from it.”
Nearly half of workers said they were more likely to discuss politics in the workplace this election season than in the past, according to an American Psychological Association survey taken in August. About a quarter witnessed or overheard their coworkers arguing about politics and about 1 in 10 have gotten into an argument themselves.
Like those folks in Fort Myers last weekend, people in swing states are being inundated with political ads, which amplifies the exhaustion factor, Wright says. “It wears you out,” she says.
Some people even believe it has worn out the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is basically just where it was two years ago. When asked if the market’s flat performance was the result of investor election exhaustion or the campaign zapping energy out of the market or a sign investors want the slugfest to be over, Gary Kaltbaum, president of Kaltbaum Capital Management, shot back this email: “Yes. Yes. And Yes. Very tired.”
And Donald Luskin, chief investment officer at TrendMacro, a financial research firm, zapped out a recent report to clients titled, “Let’s Talk About Something Other than the Election.”
How ’bout those Indians?
“I expect political fatigue to last for quite some time.” Matt Kruse, developer of the political filter “Social Fixer”