I’d like to see a poll about how many people used to regularly watch / read the news, who have gradually stopped. During regular meetings with family members, I’ve noticed a sharp decline. This was partly due to frustration about Biden bashing and campaign coverage. It’s definitely worse now because people have checked out to reduce stress.
Agreed. It’s given me a different perspective on people in my area who were unaware that an entire hospital network had closed. It wasn’t just a few folks, either, but the story / situation had been covered for at least 2 years before the final announcement came. People keep showing up at closed facilities, shocked to find out no one is there.
My family used to enjoy discussing current events at every meal / holiday / gathering. Now, when the latest developments involving come up, most want to talk about anything else. When I share things I’ve heard or read about in the past week, I’m shocked that they didn’t already know. It’s bad, and only getting worse because formerly trusted news sources are firing reporters, making their coverage flattering to , and letting the regime drive the narrative by flooding the zone. I understand why people have checked out, because wading through all that is exhausting.
My news consumption patterns have changed over the years. During the pandemic, I pretty much stopped watching mainstream news and got hooked on Twitch news/politics streams. As a result, I’m not always as up-to-date on local events as I ought to be, but I’m better informed on national and international happenings than I was before.
Since the last major election, I’ve had to scale back some on my news/politics coverage, because it’s so easy to get depressed and/or feel overloaded. I also can’t stand hearing 47’s voice for long periods of time; I’ve had to nope out of streams to avoid hearing him talk because I just can’t stand it, it frays what’s left of my nerves.
My mom’s side of the family avoids discussing politics, to prevent fights, as we’ve got a wide range of views from uninterested/burned out, to Trumpers, centrists, liberals, and I’m probably the furthest Left of us all (and I actively hide just how far Left I am to avoid scaring or angering older relatives, though I’ve had limited but interesting conversations with my liberal aunt and my centrist cousin. I avoid getting into it at all with the Trump fans, to the point I don’t/won’t engage with the family Facebook group so I can’t see what they post.)
There’s not much left of my dad’s side of the family. My aunt is traditionally conservative/old-school-Republican (she didn’t approve of Trump’s performance the first time around) but is open-minded enough to embrace LGBTQ rights, so we’ve bonded on that issue and pretty much leave the rest alone. My cousin and uncle don’t seem interested in politics at all, so we don’t discuss it.
Myself and most everyone I talk to… complete fatigue and withdrawal from all sources of info. Why not? The well is poisoned somewhere, we all know it, we are tired of the poison… some nights we vomit, some nights we cry… until we get tired of being poisoned.
this leaves us vulnerable to lack of information.
I have a couple of areas I decided I will prioritize, trying to keep myself informed enough to be useful. Thus my consumption of information has become very very clearly biased and minimal, especially about anything I end up seeing a lot on any form of social media. Paradoxically overinformed and underinformed. Snowblind.
I think for sure enough people employ a similar strategy that there could be a small but still significant amount of voters who only kind of knew they replaced Biden with Harris vaguely if they checked out of political news online and were already not consuming mainstream news for some time. Even moreso if for whatever reason they might not be standard mainstream voters to the Democratic party eg. consuming news in another language.
The problem with measuring things like that is also that you kind of can’t trust self-reporting. People are prone to misremembering or could say they “didn’t know” when really they mean they misunderstood something fundamental. I find it plausible some people completely and utterly tuned out before Harris ran though. Enough to be worth chasing?
I don’t know if there is any hard data, but Google searches for “Did Joe Biden drop out?” spiked in some areas on election day.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but I do think there are more people who just don’t pay much attention at all to what’s going on in the world than some of us realize. A lot of people are spending all their energy just trying to get through each day and figure out how to pay their bills. And I can see how, if you’ve been living paycheck to paycheck for 20, 30, 40 years, through Republican Presidents and Democratic Presidents and Republican controlled Congresses and Democratic controlled Congresses, you could decide that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, that none of that is going to change your life or affect you. That’s not true, of course, but I can see how people could get to that belief and just stop paying attention.
All true in my experience too. I think the country’s emphasis on individualism is also a big factor. So many people don’t think and feel like they’re a part of anything political. I know several educated, intelligent people who say they’re not a Democrat or a Republican. “I just vote for the person’s policies.”
Too true. Even local media has dropped the ball on issues of importance to residents of communities. Instead, they also chase clicks/likes/ratings by focusing on anything dramatic. There’s also the issue of local news takeovers by partisan groups that just repeat/emphasize the same talking points they broadcast on cable or the radio.
I remember watching Jimmy Kimmel the day after the election. They asked people about their plans to vote that day, and followed up by asking if they expected to find long lines at the polls. I’m not sure how many people didn’t make the final cut by saying they already voted and that the election was over. Still, it was jarring to see people either just lying about their plans or really unaware it was too late.
I don’t have any links and I can google later if I have time, but I’ve seen reports before that most self described independent voters almost exclusively vote either Republican or Democrat. In other words, they’re not being entirely honest with themselves.
Yeah I’ve long accepted that some people see the value in a political poker face. This is fine I think actually. Like it should be ok for people to maintain a professional identity and social identity separate from any political party when they are a Democrat in a Red State or a Republican in a Blue City. This ideally should be true even if they are identifiably gay, an immigrant, a certain race, a certain gender, or alternatively ambiguous on any contended fronts of self-concept and personal life.
Even more ideally it would be safe to be open about everything everywhere but we are objectively not living in that reality.
I don’t know if anybody should keep giving up ground there. It may be small but a signal is a signal and such people are at least brave enough to signal ambivalence or ask questions vs those who double down.
The fact that this kind of social coding isn’t followed up by similar voting patterns doesn’t surprise me and also makes me wonder if people assuming so is the effect of cutting off the sciences from the humanities so early in education and so pervasively. This is going to be especially heightened given the fact that both parties have an assortment of positions that are either incongruent with each other or are deeply unpopular with some fragment of their bases so identifying hard with a party can signal all kinds of crazy things depending on your social surroundings.
No argument here. I hadn’t really thought about it until your comment got me wondering (so it’s all your fault, right? ), but it seemed really high to me.
That would be fascinating. The flip side (how many people never used to watch/read the news but have increased their consumption in recent years) would also be interesting. Especially if we could correlate those answers with the respondents’ political views and voting history.
I’ve stopped hiding it because I no longer give a shit if it angers or scares them. I was at dinner with out of town relatives who are old-school Dems and one centrist Dem. The discussion came around to Zohran Mamdani and the centrist started spewing nonsense about “socialism” and “who wants that?” and most of the table raised their hands and said “yes, please!” Or “sign me up!” He asked, “do you want New York City to become Venezuela?” I pointed out Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist, so in other words, like Sweden or Norway, where people are way more happy than Americans. I think he was shocked that there was so much vocal support around the table, and damn straight he needed that reality check.
This is where years of anti-communist/socialist propaganda and the constant attack on critical thinking fields of study has gotten us… people not understanding what socialism IS in historically reality. It’s just a slur or something to be afraid of to most people, not a perfectly acceptable and even more democratic way to organize our shared political life. Drives me crazy, especially from people who really should know better. Educated people, people who care about democracy and about helping others…
Hm… critical thinking fields of study… I like that turn of phrase…
Instead, research dating back to 2000 shows that the most effective way to get people to the polls—including chronic nonvoters—is with direct personal contact.
I think think is right. This is purely anecdotal, but I was talking to some friends of mine who live in various parts of NYC the other evening, and I asked them about Mamdani, and boy were they excited to talk about him. And every single one of them had a story about someone from Mamdani’s campaign knocking on their door and, in one case, talking to them for about an hour.
I mean, isn’t a major problem that everyone keeps talking about the national loneliness epidemic… hell, the previous surgeon general made this a national awareness campaign. I think that Kat Abughazaleh (sp?) has the right of it, too, by doing things like using her fund raising to offer services to folks… I think that a politics of connection and humanity would go a long way to dealing with our political problems. Lots of people probably fell into things like Qanon and Trumpism because they FELT alone, and this gave them a kind of community to feel less alone… It’s less about “sempai noticed me” and more about, “sempai noticed us together at this rally”…
come up, most want to talk about anything else. When I share things I’ve heard or read about in the past week, I’m shocked that they didn’t already know. It’s bad, and only getting worse because formerly trusted news sources are firing reporters, making their coverage flattering to 
Even local media has dropped the ball on issues of importance to residents of communities. Instead, they also chase clicks/likes/ratings by focusing on anything dramatic. There’s also the issue of local news takeovers by partisan groups that just repeat/emphasize the same talking points they broadcast on cable or the radio.
), but it seemed really high to me.