Liberal voters are expressing a sense of fatigue in their ongoing resistance against former President Donald Trump as the 2024 election approaches, The New York Times reported on Monday.
Fury propelled voters to cast ballots against Trump in the 2020 presidential election and Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections, according to Democrats the NYT spoke to. However, this fervor has diminished since then as the effort required to maintain it has been draining to these voters.
“Some folks are burned out on outrage,” Rebecca Lee Funk, founder of the Outrage, a progressive activism organization, told the NYT. “People are tired. I think last election we were desperate to get Trump out of office, and folks were willing to rally around that singular call to action. And this election feels different.”
President Joe Biden is attempting to rally the anti-Trump vote by portraying the former president as an existential threat to democracy but the message is struggling to fuel Democrats thus far, according to the NYT.
Trump was ahead of Biden by 4.3 points in the RealClearPolitics (RCP) average in late January, which is his largest lead this cycle against the president. He never led Biden in the RCP average during the 2020 election.
“Exhaustion is underlying the entire attitude toward our presidential election,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told the NYT. “When you’ve got two people that are opposed by 70 percent of Americans who want a different choice, it creates frustration, anxiety and discouragement.”
Americans across party lines are concerned about Biden’s age and some Democrats are failing to maintain their outrage against Trump as the sentiment has dragged on for the better part of a decade at this point, according to the NYT.
Among American adults, 86% believe Biden is “too old” ahead of the 2024 election, compared to 62% who said the same of Trump, an ABC News/Ipsos survey recently found.
“We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out,” Pittsburgh security guard and Democrat Shannon Caseber, told the NYT. She described the likely Trump-Biden rematch as a “dumpster fire,” adding, “It’s crisis fatigue, for sure.”
“Any sense of urgency that we had with the 2020 election — I think it’s still there in the sense that no one wants Trump to be president, at least for Democrats, but it’s exhausting,” she told the NYT.
Nearly 40% of Democrats selected “exhaustion” as their sentiment about the 2024 election compared to 26% of Republicans, according to a September Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
During Biden’s presidency, there has been an ongoing border crisis, war between Ukraine and Russia and war between Israel and terrorist group Hamas.
“We’ve dealt with so many emergencies these past few years: national emergencies, perceived emergencies, real emergencies — it’s just kind of like, that is not really a strong motivator for me anymore,” anti-Trump Los Angeles voter Mr. Dower told the NYT. “A lot of us would like a more positive thing to motivate us … Not just purely, ‘Do this or else this bad thing is going to happen.’”
Over 85% of Republicans and conservatives said they were “extremely/very motivated” to vote in the 2024 election compared to 74% of Democrats and liberals, according to a recent CNN poll.
The Outrage did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Jason Cohen on February 19, 2024
