Many are tired of politics

By Doug Livingston

Akron Beacon Journal

AKRON

As she realized what she had in her hands, Andrea Barnes’ eyes lit up as if she were holding toxicity.

“It’s not that Glenn Beck,” she said of the author’s name on the book.

But as she turned to the inside jacket cover and saw a portrait of the polarizing, conservative radio and talk-show host, she knew otherwise.

“Oh,” she said.

Barnes, 44, likens Beck to Rush Limbaugh, another divisive commentator.

“Anger. Everybody is so angry. I guess that leads into fear,” she said, referring to the rise of unconventional presidential candidates who rally worried voters by identifying and denigrating a perceived enemy.

Preferring that opposing views be respected and not indiscriminately rejected, Barnes took a few minutes to reflect on the state of politics before slipping the book back on a shelf at Cuyahoga Falls Public Library.

“If we’re going to solve any problems, we have to have civil discourse and be tolerant of others,” Barnes said, feeling better to have released some of her own frustration.

Call it fear. Call it anger. Call it discontent.

As Americans grow unusually interested in a presidential election that is nearly a year away, they come to the party with an unusually high level of disgust, according to a recent poll by the Ray C. Bliss Institute for Applied Politics at the University of Akron.

Asked in November to rank their satisfaction with American politics on a scale of one (utter disgust) to 10 (complete satisfaction), 24 percent of Ohioans picked the number one.

The worst.

The bottom.

Only 1 percent picked the highest satisfaction rating of 10.

It was that lopsided.

The poll on political approval found a majority of Ohioans are disgusted to some degree. What’s acutely noticeable is that the response rate for those with absolute disgust (that bottom rating of one) has tripled since 2008.

The results leave Bliss director John Green contemplating whether Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is the man of the hour or a sign of the times.

His provocations seem to boost his ratings, but for which reason?

“It could very well be that when we look back, we’ll say, ‘Well, Trump was a very unique person,’” Green said.

“But when I look at it, I see that whatever uniqueness he may have in his background, he does sort of capture a lot of the trends in media and the decline of civility and the rise of an adversarial culture that many of us have been talking about for a couple of decades.

“And that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Bliss surveyed 600 registered Ohio voters after the November election to find that 57 percent give American politics a negative score, up sharply from 22 percent in 2008. The poll has a 4 percent margin of error.

When the poll was done in 2008, the economy had not yet fallen off the cliff, and a nation weary of war was watching exciting presidential campaigns begin to solidify.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, a war hero and elder statesman, had locked up the Republican nomination, and Democrats were weighing two historic candidates: an African-American and a woman.

Green noted a groundswell of “hope and change” from both parties at that time.

There’s much debate about the effects of negative advertising on the emotions of voters, but campaigns increasingly attack opponents because they believe it works. Research shows that campaign advertising hit an all-time high in the 2012 race, and negative ads accounted for more than 60 percent of the air time, also an all-time high.

Already in Ohio, a powerful swing state in presidential elections, negative ads have been aired on prime-time television against Hillary Clinton a half-year before the Ohio primary election and a year before the general election.

The question is, does that kind of activity give rise to more angst among voters?

In Ohio, according to an analysis of the Bliss poll, voters most dissatisfied with American politics are more likely to be among these groups: young; white; men; without advanced college degrees; residents of southeast Ohio; regularly attend church; or are more concerned with terrorism, immigration and abortion than the economy or climate change.