After Super Tuesday, exhausted Americans face 8 more months of presidential campaigning

Campaign volunteers set up signs encouraging people to vote. AP Photo/Vasha Hunt by Jared McDonald, University of Mary Washington Now that Super Tuesday is over and the Democratic and Republican nominees are all but officially chosen, as everyone expected, voters can turn the page to the general election. But they’re not excited about it, and they haven’t been for months. A September 2023 Monmouth University poll showed no more than 40% of Americans said they were “enthusiastic” for either Biden or Trump to run again. That same month, the Pew Research Center found that 65% of Americans were exhausted with the current state of American politics. In February 2024, The New York Times said Democrats in particular were burned out by the seemingly endless avalanche of political crises. You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa. It is not surprising that a rematch of the 2020 election is failing to inspire excitement in the American people. Yet, as a political scientist who studies citizen engagement and the public’s feelings toward the candidates, I find these trends disturbing. It’s not just polarization that’s driving voters’ malaise – it’s something else, which carries a stark warning for the...