Two-thirds of US adults tune in to political issues, survey finds | 2024 US Election News

Months after the presidential election, a new poll highlights a decades-long trend of political fatigue in the US.

After a year dominated by a relentless and intense US presidential election campaign, Americans are looking for a break from politics, a new poll suggests.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Thursday found that 65 percent of American adults say they see a need to limit their use of media on politics and government “because of information overload.” [and] fatigue”.

Harassed by the political party, nearly seven in 10 Democratic Party voters – 72 percent – say they are backing away from political issues. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans said the same and 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 taking some time off.”

This survey conducted in early December comes a few weeks after Donald Trump won the November 5 presidential election, defeating his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Media coverage has focused on Trump and Harris as they have spent months on the campaign trail, traveling across the country holding rallies and meeting with voters.

Since Trump's victory, the US president-elect – and his plans for when he enters the White House next month – have dominated the news cycle.

But as the AP-NORC poll found, US television news ratings show that more Americans aren't listening as 2024 draws to a close.

After the election night through Dec. 13, prime-time viewers for news network MSNBC averaged 620,000 households, down 54 percent from this year's pre-election audience, Nielsen said. CNN's average of 405,000 viewers was down 45 percent during the same period.

There was a noticeable difference, however, when looking at the numbers for Fox News, the favorite network of Trump supporters.

There, the post-election average of 2.68 million viewers was up 13 percent, Nielsen said.

Since the election, 72 percent of people who watched one of those three evening cable channels watched Fox News, compared to 53 percent before Election Day.

Political fatigue and the need to disengage from the news is nothing new in the US, where polarization and divisive rhetoric have increased in recent years.

In 2020, the Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of Americans reported feeling “exhausted” by the amount of news they receive, about the same percentage of people who said they experienced news fatigue in 2018.

Pew also reported in September last year that 65 percent of people interviewed said they were always tired or exhausted when thinking about politics and 55 percent said they were always angry or often angry.

The same study found that nearly eight in ten Americans responded negatively when asked to describe the political climate in the country, with many choosing the word “divisive” to describe the situation.

Arash Javanbakht, associate professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University in the state of Michigan, US, has explained that the “politics of fear” is among the top three reasons why many Americans are not involved in politics.

“The COVID-19 pandemic, more than a decade of intense political repression, social media divisiveness and wars around the world, and public disillusionment with American politics and the media, have led, I believe, to many people to face burnout and learn helplessness,” he wrote in The Conversation this month.