Paying Attention

Via Jerome Armstrong, Charles Franklin makes a chart, comparing the number of people who tell Pew they're following the president campaign "very closely" to what's been seen in earlier cycles.

As you can see, the level of interest in the 2008 race is unprecedentedly high. I note that while public interest in politics seems like a good thing, it's probably an indicator of bad conditions in the country. Citizens seemed bored by the 1996 and 2000 campaigns that, not coincidentally, occurred during times of peace, prosperity, and good government. Bush's terribleness, by contrast, seems to be sparking a resurgence of interest in democracy greater even than what the poor economic conditions of the '92 campaign could achieve.

Comments

Or perhaps this is due, at least in part, to the absurdly long campaign season we're now dealing with. I'd wager the media's covering the race to a greater extent this cycle than in '96 or 2000 at the equivalent period; it's only natural people would therefore say they feel like they're "following it closely," whatever they interpret that to mean.

Posted by Tim P. | August 2, 2007 10:36 AM

What I see in this graph.

1) 50% more people will start paying attention in the next 8 months

2) previous campaigns didn't even have any data the far out from the election

3) the level of interest is similar to the start date of earlier campaigns but the start date is earlier

4) the Y-axis is needlessly chopped to make a pretty graph, starting at 7 instead of zero in not worth the confusion

Posted by joejoejoe | August 2, 2007 10:39 AM

why did these crazy people elect this crazy person twice..

oh...I see.

Posted by judson | August 2, 2007 11:03 AM

Everyone is good and ready for Bush to be done with the job -- not least the media, since Bush's lack of interest in doing anything except maintain the status quo in Iraq make him oh so boring to cover.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | August 2, 2007 11:04 AM

The early start to the campaign season could also be something of an indicator of just how sick people are of this administration.

Posted by Becca | August 2, 2007 11:23 AM

Attention is higher earlier because campaigns are active earlier, and media coverage is higher earlier. The curve won't rise all that much because after another year of this people will be sick and tired of it.

Posted by DHN | August 2, 2007 11:37 AM

Don't forget this is the first race which had both sides without a clear-cut frontrunner (like a Veep) and lots (and lots) of relatively unknown contenders. Granted, part of the interest has to do with anti-Bush sentiments, but part of it has to do with the "who are these clowns?" nature of the race.

Posted by Klug | August 2, 2007 11:40 AM

I like the thesis, just not the evidence.

What is different about this election than all the others is that both fields are wide open, meaning that roughly double the amount of people should be interested in the early part of this campaign season, which has quite a lot to do with primaries.

Doing an eyeball estimate of the data, it looks like about 15-25% are interested in this campaign during its "entry point". For overlapping dates, interest in the previous three elections bounced between about 8% (at a low) and 15%.

If anything, this indicates to me that there is a core of committed folks that are early political adopters, regardless of circumstance. I'd like to think that our current state of affairs draws excites more than usual political interest. I'm just not seeing it from this.

Posted by Brad L | August 2, 2007 11:48 AM

This may be one explaination as to why the Democratic race is so stable. Unfortunately for those who do not support Clinton, it undermines their argument that she is leading only because of her name-recognition.

Posted by JoeCHI | August 2, 2007 11:59 AM

This may be one explaination as to why the Democratic race is so stable. Unfortunately for those who do not support Clinton, it undermines their argument that she is leading only because of her name-recognition.

Posted by JoeCHI | August 2, 2007 11:59 AM

I wonder whether 20-25% of the population paying attention to the Presidential campaign is a marker for political arousal, generally, and whether it indicates a heightened probability for a political event to trigger mobilization.

Among the political junkies, the term, Constitutional Crisis, is commonplace. A real Constitutional Crisis has an organic component -- people become suddenly and unaccountably fixated on the political drama. The last time I saw anything like that was in the Bork S.C. hearings. (The Clinton impeachment was oddly devoid of that feeling of mobilized attention.)

Because of their positions in the Senate, both Clinton and Obama have potential parts to play in a great drama, later this year. Call it the October primary.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | August 2, 2007 12:31 PM

There is an alternative explanation to the early interest. The campaign started earlier than in the previous years.

Posted by DonB | August 2, 2007 1:16 PM

What I see is a crap load of variance in the level of interest, which indicates that this probably isn't a very reliable study, and one should hesitate to draw conclusions based on it...

Posted by TW Andrews | August 2, 2007 3:58 PM

Of course, there were some Matt Yglesias posts in 2004 explaining how Bush's widely-recognized unique terribleness was producing unprecedented political events in that election. (Though not, in the event, the unprecedented event of a Democratic victory.) Everything is new if (i) you are young and (ii) you put all disconfirming events down the memory hole.

Posted by y81 | August 2, 2007 9:21 PM