After months of reporting on the presidential election, a new poll underscores a years-long trend of political fatigue in the United States.
After a year dominated by the relentless and intense United States Presidential campaignAmericans are craving a break from political news, according to a new survey.
The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll published on Thursday found that 65 percent of U.S. adults said they had felt the need to limit media consumption about politics and government “due to information overload (and) fatigue.”
Broken down by political affiliation, about seven in 10 Democratic Party voters — 72 percent — said they would stay away from political news. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans said the same as 63 percent of independents.
“People are mentally exhausted,” Ziad Aunallah, a 45-year-old from San Diego, California, told the AP. “Everyone knows what’s coming and we’re just taking some time off.”
The survey, conducted in early December, comes weeks later Republican Donald Trump secured a victory over his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the November 5 presidential election.
Media coverage focused on Trump and Harris, who campaigned for months and traveled across the country holding rallies and meeting with voters.
Since Trump’s victory, the elected US president – and his plans for once he’s coming to the White House next month – have dominated the news cycle.
But as the AP-NORC poll found, U.S. television news ratings show many Americans aren’t tuning in as 2024 comes to a close.
After election night through Dec. 13, television news channel MSNBC’s prime-time viewership averaged 620,000 households, 54 percent less than its pre-election viewership this year, the Nielsen company said. CNN’s average of 405,000 viewers fell 45 percent over the same period.
However, there was a clear difference when you looked at the numbers Fox News Channela popular network for Trump supporters.
There, the post-election average of 2.68 million viewers increased by 13 percent, said Nielsen.
Since the election, 72 percent of people who watched one of these three cable channels in the evening watched Fox News, compared to 53 percent before Election Day.
Political fatigue and the need to distance oneself from the news are not a new phenomenon in the United States polarization and divisive rhetoric have skyrocketed in recent years.
In 2020, the Pew Research Center found that about two-thirds of Americans reported feeling “exhausted” by the amount of news available to them, almost the same percentage of people who reported feeling news fatigue in 2018.
Pew too reported in September Last year, 65 percent of respondents said they always or often felt exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55 percent said they always or often felt angry.
The same poll found that about eight in 10 Americans responded negatively when asked to describe the state of politics in the country, with many choosing the word “divisive” to explain the situation.
Arash Javanbakht, an associate professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University in Michigan, has said that “the politics of fear” is among the top three reasons many Americans are leaving politics.
“The COVID-19 pandemic, more than a decade of intense political tensions, polarizing social media and wars around the world, and public disillusionment with U.S. politics and media have, I believe, led to many people experiencing burnout and learned helplessness experienced,, he wrote in The Conversation this month.
