The Stupidest Election of My Lifetime

Many Americans are paying so little attention they can't even believe the candidates will be Trump and Biden. I can hardly blame them.

Dear readers,

On Tuesday, the author Kat Rosenfield tweeted that voting in the upcoming presidential election will be like dining at a restaurant whose menu offers only “a large bowl of lukewarm watery gruel” or “a flaming hot cheeto someone dropped under the couch in 2014 that has been slightly nibbled on by mice.”

Outraged liberals attacked her for false equivalency, but they apparently didn’t think her metaphor through: if you did go to a restaurant offering only these two menu options, you would order the gruel every time. Similarly, Rosenfield will vote for Biden. It’s fair enough to say she, like the rest of the electorate, owes it to you to vote against Trump, a criminal who does not adhere to democratic norms. But neither she nor any other voter owes you any excitement about it.

We are headed for the first presidential election rematch since 1956. Both candidates are unpopular. Both candidates are also extremely well-known to voters. As ever, it would probably be a good thing if more voters had a clear understanding of the policy stakes of the election — there are eligible voters out there who believe Joe Biden is pro-life because states banned abortion while he was president, for example, and a higher level of policy awareness might help people like that make decisions that better align with their actual preferences. But I’m not terribly optimistic that the voters who need this kind of information most will find it by reading and watching news about the campaign. And I can’t exactly blame the normies for tuning out. This campaign sucks. I wish I knew less about it too.

There is a popular but mistaken idea that paying close attention to politics is a civic duty. A lot of the people who espouse this idea are what the political scientist Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyists”: people who watch MSNBC or Fox News for hours on end, who reshare tiresome political memes on Facebook and ruin family dinners with political rants, and who generally make themselves miserable by being angry about the opposing party all the time, but who do not actually do anything (besides vote) that affects electoral outcomes. A Biden voter who spends the next ten months tearing his or her hair out in front of the television will have exactly the same effect on the election outcome as one who ignores the campaign until October, wakes up to discover that we really (really!) are doing this again, and then sighs and orders another bowl of gruel. That voter will have had more time to pursue a more fun hobby in the meantime.

It is unclear to me the extent to which voter apathy and disgust about this election is a problem for President Biden’s re-election prospects. As the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with Ezra Klein on a recent podcast, the parties’ electoral coalitions have shifted during the Trump era, with Democrats gaining support from highly educated, high-income suburbanites who tend to be what she calls “4-4” voters: people who show up in a campaign’s voter file as having voted in four of the last four elections, and who can be relied upon to turn out no matter how dull or dejecting a campaign is. Republicans have made gains with irregular voters, including significant gains with non-white voters who did not attend college. That shift means that, all things equal, Democrats are better off when the electorate is less engaged and turnout is lower; this is a reason Democrats have posted such strong results in low-turnout special elections during the Biden administration. On the other hand, there’s strong evidence in the polling that Biden has more trouble with the irregular voters who backed him in 2020 than Trump has with his own irregular voters. A falloff in turnout that is asymmetrical could cost Biden the election.

Dall-E 3 image generation for “bored, depressed voters”

The Biden campaign has been talking to reporters about its plan for fighting the asymmetrical dejection about this stupid campaign. They say their campaign research shows that 75% of the voters they’re targeting to convert to supporters simply don’t believe Trump will be the Republican nominee.¹ They believe that once those voters accept the reality that Trump and Biden will be on the ballot and are reminded about what they disliked about Trump last time, they will come around and vote for Biden again. I find this theory plausible. I would also note that this analysis is entirely consistent with Rosenfield’s tweet — this plan doesn’t involve generating enthusiasm for Biden or even getting swing voters to like him. It’s just a matter of reminding voters that the other option is an aged, rodent-nibbled hot Cheeto.² Maybe Biden’s strategists have read my piece on what they can learn from Gray Davis, the large bowl of lukewarm watery gruel who twice got elected governor of California, the second time when he was quite unpopular.

The other big things Biden has going for him right now, besides running against an ancient vermin-nibbled Cheeto³, are falling interest rates and improving public attitudes about the economy. The University of Michigan’s monthly measure of consumer sentiment rose sharply in December and again in January, reaching its highest level since July 2021. It’s not hard for me to imagine an electorate that is, by November, less bitter about the economy and more focused on the reasons that most people have negative views of Donald Trump — and ready to give Biden a clear victory. But it is difficult for me to imagine people actually feeling good about the election or enjoying following the campaign.

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