Why This Election Feels Never-Ending By Emma Roller SEPT. 6, 2016
I’m not positive, but at least somewhat sure, that this presidential election has been going on since Hannibal’s elephants crossed the Alps. It has been going on since Assyria fell to Alexander the Great. It has been going on since before rocks were invented.
Nearly 17 months into the quest for the White House, some people may feel completely exhausted with the news of the campaign. These people might feel, as they sit down at their laptop and scroll through their Facebook feeds, as if they are trudging through endless waste, trying to find one colorful remnant of uplifting news in an expanse of political sludge. The campaign’s seeming interminability may even have led some campaign observers to contemplate the cool embrace of the void. Maybe. Just speculating here.
And yet, according to a linear theory of time, this presidential election will one day be over. So why does it feel never-ending?
Because the starting line moved up on us. In years past, most voters did not actually start paying close attention to the presidential campaign until after Labor Day. This is when campaigns had to get serious in their appeals to voters and solidify their ground game ahead of Election Day.
But in recent decades, Labor Day has lost its importance in presidential election — and this year’s bitter contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump has only served to make a long campaign feel even longer. At least half of the American population thinks our election season is too long, according to Pew.
In his book “The Vanishing Voter,” Thomas Patterson, a Harvard political scientist, writes that Labor Day speeches “once served as coming-out parties” for party nominees. In 1936, in the doldrums of the Great Depression, roughly half a million people in Detroit turned out to see President Franklin Delano Roosevelt kick off his re-election campaign. But in the modern presidential campaign, Mr. Patterson writes, Labor Day “might as well be Groundhog Day.”
While it may seem that many voters are checked out of the grueling campaign process, this year’s electorate has actually been more engaged than in many recent campaigns. It’s not hard to figure out why more people started paying attention to this election earlier than they did in 2012 — just look to the glowing orange beacon on your TV screen.
“The public got more involved earlier this year than in the past, and I think you can point to one person as the reason: Donald Trump,” Mr. Patterson said in an interview.
He added that Mr. Trump has a “water-cooler effect” — people like to talk about him — which could also account for the early voter engagement.
“There’s nothing quite like people talking as an indicator of their engagement in the campaign,” Mr. Patterson said. He added, “Now, whether he gets them thinking is a different thing. But he does get them talking.”
The water-cooler effect is apparent online as well, according to CrowdTangle, a tool that tracks social media usage. The company compared Facebook users’ engagement in the 2012 election between March and September with engagement numbers for the same period of time in 2016. Its findings: the number of public posts that mentioned “Hillary” or “Trump” was roughly the same as the number of posts that mentioned “Obama” or “Romney” in 2012. But the number of interactions — that is, the number of likes, shares and comments generated by users — quadrupled between 2012 and 2016, from 90 million to 361 million. Facebook’s daily active users roughly doubled in that time, but still, that makes it double the users, quadruple the interaction.
“In my opinion, those are pretty amazing numbers,” Brandon Silverman, the co-founder and chief executive of CrowdTangle, said in an email. He added that this election cycle “is generating a massive amount of interest and passion in the election, even this early on, and an extraordinary amount of it is being expressed on Facebook every day.”
Mr. Trump has singularly engaged people in the election — positively or negatively — earlier than voters normally would be paying attention. Last August, more than 24 million viewers tuned in to watch the first debate of the Republican primary, breaking ratings records. By comparison, the most-watched Republican primary debate in 2012 attracted 7.6 million viewers.
Labor Day is also the time when, conventional wisdom says, candidates really start to “pivot” toward the general election, taking a more moderate tack than they did during the primaries. That may be one reason reporters eagerly wondered if Mr. Trump’s visit to Mexico last week, and his subsequent immigration speech in Arizona, represented a potential pivot point. Would he be softening his immigration stance? Would he put a more “humane gloss” on his views toward undocumented immigrants? In the end, no such pivoting, softening, or glossing occurred.
The fact that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump are two of the most polarizing and least well-liked general election candidates in recent history has also likely driven discussion. This election has been more volatile than the last presidential election. Between July and September 2012, President Obama maintained a slim 2-point margin above his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. Over the same two-month period this year, Mrs. Clinton’s lead over Mr. Trump grew from 5 points to 6.5 points.
So, where does voter fatigue come from, and why does it seem to be getting worse? One part of the problem is that our election season is simply too long. The United States has the longest head-of-state campaign season by a long shot. Senator Ted Cruz, the first serious candidate to announce he was running, announced on March 23, 2015. That means that, by Election Day, the campaign will have gone on for 597 days. In the span with which we’ve been paying attention to the same presidential campaign, we could have instead hosted approximately four Mexican elections, seven Canadian elections, 14 British elections, 14 Australian elections or 41 French elections.
It’s hard not to get exhausted when there’s barely a break between when one campaign ends and speculation about the next campaign begins. Political journalists — ahem — can also claim partial responsibility for voter fatigue. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that roughly six in ten Americans “feel exhausted by the amount of election coverage.” Still, there could be at least one upside to the deluge of campaign coverage over the past year-and-a-half: a large volume of media coverage has been found to contribute to higher voter turnout in November.
That is the irony of this year’s election: Voters are simultaneously more interested in, and more exhausted with, the campaign than in past election years.
So if Labor Day doesn’t really matter anymore, when’s the new starting point for when the election kicks into high gear? Mr. Patterson said the first presidential debate between the two party nominees could act as the new starting gun.
“The conditions are such that the debates could make more of a difference than they normally do,” he said.
While the debates in a “normal” election year mainly serve to solidify both sides’ support for their candidate, this year’s debates could be a potentially huge reckoning for Mr. Trump, who may have gotten off a few zingers during the primary debates, but who has nowhere near the policy fluency that Mrs. Clinton does. That could stand out to voters who haven’t yet made up their minds.
So, undecided voters — yes, all four of you — vacation is over. It’s time for you to start paying attention to every tweet, sound bite and policy proposal that populate your TV, smartphone and computer screen. Come on in, the sludge is fine.
On Labor Day, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Begin a Final Sprint Ashley Parker SEPT. 5, 2016
CLEVELAND — Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump ran virtually parallel campaigns on Monday as they geared up for the final stretch of the presidential race. She made nice with the news media by opening up her campaign plane and chatting with reporters. He followed suit, inviting a smaller group of reporters onto his plane and answering questions during the 30-minute flight.
She took along her running mate, and so did he, as both focused on Ohio and nearly crossed paths in Cleveland. Their motorcades all but passed each other, and all four candidates’ planes ended up on the tarmac at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport at the same time.
Mrs. Clinton moved on several fronts on Monday to confront nagging doubts about her candidacy, despite her comfortable lead in many swing-state polls. Courting labor supporters, she met with union leaders in Cleveland while her husband, Bill Clinton, appeared at a Labor Day parade in Detroit. Seeking the backing of progressive voters, she enlisted her primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who made his first solo appearance on Mrs. Clinton’s behalf at a rally in New Hampshire.
And her outreach to reporters included her most extensive question-and-answer session with them in months. She expressed alarm “about the credible reports about Russian government interference in our elections” through hacking, saying, “We’ve never had a foreign adversarial power be already involved in our electoral process.”
Not to be outdone, Mr. Trump used his airborne meeting with reporters to clarify his views on immigration, saying he opposed any path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. But he did not explicitly rule out a long-term path to legal status if the nation’s immigration system is overhauled.
“We’re going to make that decision into the future,” Mr. Trump said. But, he added, “to become a citizen, you are going to have to go out and come back in through the process. You’re going to have to go out and get in line. This isn’t touchback. You have to get in line.”
On the plane, Mr. Trump also told reporters that, “as of this moment,” he planned to attend all three debates, and that only a “natural disaster” could make him change his mind. He added that, while he was preparing, he was not holding mock debate sessions.
Labor Day is traditionally the beginning of a two-month sprint to Election Day, in which candidates try to seize voters’ attention as summer fades and debates loom. Monday was no exception. The visits to Ohio by Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton — along with their respective running mates, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia — highlighted the importance of a state that Republicans believe Mr. Trump must win to have any shot of reaching the White House.
“Labor Day comes, and it’s kind of like a recalibration,” said Beth Myers, who managed Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign and served as his senior adviser in 2012. “You see the finish line, you see that there’s not too many game-changing events left, and most campaigns take a measure of where you are on Labor Day.”
This cycle, however, both candidates have eschewed traditional campaigning, albeit in divergent ways. Normally, they would already have been circling each other in swing states.
But Mrs. Clinton has spent most of the summer away from the campaign trail, focusing on fund-raising in places like the Hamptons and Beverly Hills with celebrities like Jimmy Buffett and Harvey Weinstein. Mr. Trump has also kept a languid pace, favoring large rallies, often in the evening, over several daily stops.
Mr. Trump, a political novice, and Mrs. Clinton, a veteran politician, are confronting historically low approval ratings among voters for whom they are well-known commodities.
“Labor Day used to be this big, important marker in the campaign season,” said Amy Walter, the national editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “A kickoff, if you will. Today, it feels like the start of the third quarter instead of the kickoff.”
“The candidates are well-defined, the ads have been running for months and TVs have been saturated with talking heads,” she added.
Mr. Trump tried to burnish his image as a statesman last week with a hastily arranged trip to Mexico City. He has also tried to increase his outreach to minorities, from a promised “softening” on immigration that concluded with a fiery, nativist speech in Phoenix, to a stop at a black church in Detroit.
That approach was also on display on Monday. At a diner in Cleveland, Mr. Trump met Maria Hernandez, a Mexican-American who said she was supporting him. “Mexican-American supports Trump,” he said. “It’s so nice.” Then he turned to the nearby reporters to emphasize his focus group of one: “Make a note of it, guys,” he said.
Earlier, speaking to a dozen white men and a lone white woman at an American Legion post here, Mr. Trump criticized China’s treatment of President Obama: When the president landed in Hangzhou for the Group of 20 summit meeting, the host country forced him to disembark from the plane’s belly. Mr. Trump said he would not have gotten off the plane, but instead would have urged his crew to “get out of here.”
Mrs. Clinton’s appearance in Cleveland was meant as a show of labor support during a campaign in which many rank-and-file union members were drawn to Mr. Sanders’s promise to take on income inequality. At a Labor Day festival here, she and Mr. Kaine were joined by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, Richard L. Trumka; Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the first unions to endorse Mrs. Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton’s surrogates were also out in force. In Pittsburgh, Mr. Kaine and the man he hopes to succeed, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., spoke at a rally before the city’s Labor Day parade. Mr. Kaine assailed Mr. Trump for refusing to release his tax returns, then turned the stage over to Mr. Biden.
“My name is Joe Biden, and I work for Hillary Clinton and whatever the hell this guy’s name is,” he said.
“I would hope and ask you all, very much, that we have got to do everything we can to make sure that Hillary Clinton is elected president,” he said. “But two days after the election, we have got to continue the pressure.”
Addressing an issue that has dogged the campaign, Mr. Clinton defended the Clinton Foundation. And he criticized Mr. Trump over his own foundation, referring to a Washington Post report that found that his charitable organization paid the Internal Revenue Service a $2,500 penalty this year after improperly giving a political contribution to a campaign group with ties to the attorney general of Florida, Pam Bondi.
Mr. Trump discussed the issue in his talk with reporters aboard his plane. He denied any impropriety on either his part or Ms. Bondi’s concerning the $25,000 donation. At the time of the donation in 2013, Ms. Bondi was considering whether to investigate Trump University for fraud. In the end, she did not do so.
“I never spoke to her, first of all, she’s a fine person beyond reproach,” he said when asked about the controversy. “I never even spoke to her about it at all. She’s a fine person. Never spoken to her about it. Never.”
Many attorneys general besides Ms. Bondi, he said, decided against pursuing any action regarding Trump University. “I’ll win that case in court,” he said. “Many turned that down.”
“I never spoke to her,” he added, again referring to Ms. Bondi.
When asked what he expected to get out of the donation, he would only say: “I’ve just known Pam Bondi for years. I have a lot of respect for her. Never spoke to her about that at all. I just have a lot of respect for her, and she’s very popular.”