If the 2024 Election Is So Important, Why Does It Feel So Boring?

”This presidential election is not very interesting, but it is important,” the political commentator Josh Barro wrote in his newsletter, Very Serious. Americans certainly seem to agree with the first part. Engagement with political news has been in the dumps, and many Americans seem to be tuning out the Biden-Trump II rematch. But the conundrum of this election is that it is both numbingly overfamiliar for many voters and also profoundly important for America and the world. The differences between a Biden and a Trump presidency for America’s domestic and foreign policy are huge. Too often, these differences are ignored in horse-race coverage—and, sometimes, they even go underemphasized by the campaigns and their own advocates. If you turn on a news segment or read a long article, you’ll probably hear about the dangers that Trump poses to democracy, or the rule of law, or the administrative state. All worthy concerns. But what is at stake for our most basic bread-and-butter issues: abortion, inflation, economic growth, government spending, entitlements, immigration, and foreign policy? Josh and Derek talk about the roots of voter ambivalence, what Trump’s second administration could look like, and the biggest differences between a Biden and Trump White House.

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In the following excerpt, Derek and Josh Barro discuss why so many voters are apathetic about this year’s presidential election.

Derek Thompson: So in January, the author Kat Rosenfield tweeted that “Voting in the upcoming 2024 election would be like dining at a restaurant whose menu offered two meals. One was a large bowl of lukewarm, watery gruel, and the other was a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto someone dropped under the couch in 2014 that had been slightly nibbled on by mice.” That’s completely disgusting, but it’s not clear to me that it’s entirely wrong as far as it represents the average American’s attitude toward this election. You and I are going to talk about policy for most of this show, but I want to start with a more general non-policy observation that a feeling of desperate, heavy voter exhaustion seems to hang over everything in 2024. Why? How did it come to this?

Josh Barro: Yeah, it’s funny you start with that Kat Rosenfield tweet because people got real mad at her for that, and I think a lot of them didn’t really understand or think through the tweet very well. If you went to that literal restaurant and those were the two options on the menu, the obvious play is to order the gruel.

The options are both very unappealing, but they are not equivalent, and it is not even a difficult choice. It’s just an unpleasant choice. And so I think that is the point that she was making about this election. I fully expect that Kat Rosenfield is going to vote for Joe Biden, but it’s not very fun for her and it’s not fun to think about. It’s not an interesting, enjoyable election to engage with, and that I think is a theme that really runs through for a lot of voters—that this election is sort of deadening in a way that I can’t remember any election feeling like in my lifetime. It’s important, but it’s really not fun to follow or engage with.

Thompson: I think you put your finger right on it. My other general observation before we get into policy specifics was going to be that I think a paradoxical tension at play in this election is that 2024 does not seem like it’s about anything in the policy space, but at the same time, it still has very important policy implications. I might be misremembering, but most of the elections in my time, I remember being about a clear policy theme. To just quickly run through the last 20 years, the 2004 election, Kerry-Bush, was about the war on terror. The 2008 Democratic primary was absolutely about health-care policy, and the election ended up being about the impending recession and health care. 2012, Obama’s reelection campaign against Mitt Romney, was a referendum on Obamacare. It was a debate about economic growth. It was a debate about economic redistribution more broadly.

That’s why Romney’s makers versus takers comment played so directly into that theme. 2016 was of course about Trump’s character and Hillary’s emails, but it was also about trade and the economy and immigration. 2020 was the COVID election, in addition to being a referendum on the Trump years. And I think one of the stranger things about 2024 and this election is that it is nominally about the economy and inflation, but I don’t think any normal voter has any idea what Trump’s economic plan to reduce, say, grocery prices is. The policy focus of this election is incredibly muddy. So muddy, in fact, that your sentence about the policy stakes, excuse me, your essay about the policy stakes that we’re going to be drawing from and talking about for the next 30 minutes begins with the sentence “This presidential election is not very interesting, but it is important.” Why? Why do you think that the policy arena feels so abandoned in this moment?

Barro: I think, first of all, one of the biggest reasons this election is not very interesting is that it’s a rematch. It’s the first rematch we’ve had since 1956, and it’s between two candidates about whom people have spent years forming opinions. And it’s like, you can talk about Donald Trump, but people have spent so much time thinking about him for the last nine years, in some ways, there’s not very much that’s new to say. We’ll talk in this show about the way that some of the things he’s actually said he’s going to do on policy will influence inflation and that sort of thing. But I think for most voters, it’s like they don’t need more information about these candidates. They already know them.

And in some ways we’re answering questions that we already answered four years ago. So I think that’s the biggest reason that it just doesn’t feel very engaging. And then the other thing is I think people all around the world are dissatisfied with economic results over the last few years. You look around at other rich countries, and the incumbent leaders in those places aren’t down one point or tied or down two points. They’re down 15, 20 points.

Justin Trudeau and Rishi Sunak are going to get absolutely creamed when they come up for reelection. And there are differences in the U.S. Our economy is doing better than the economy in Canada and in the U.K., so that’s, I think, one of the reasons that Biden is running better. He’s also running better because he’s running against a deeply flawed candidate about whom people already have a lot of negative opinions. And you can see in the polling, there’s some conflicting data on the extent to which people have rosier views looking back on Donald Trump in terms of his performance. I think certainly people look favorably back on the economy during much of the Trump administration, but his favorable, unfavorable numbers haven’t really moved. It’s that Biden’s are worse than they were four years ago, but people are facing a choice between two candidates about whom they’ve already thought a lot, and neither of them is a very exciting choice for a lot of the voters, especially for the swing voters who are going to decide this election.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Josh Barro
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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