Jamelle Bouie writes about the Ariana Grande vote

30% of the adult population wasn’t even registered to vote in the 2016 presidential election, which was, relatively speaking, a high turnout event. Yet nearly two out of every five people who could have voted didn’t bother to do so. The number of eligible people who weren’t registered to vote shrunk to 27% in the 2020 election, which was by far the highest turnout election of modern times. Still, 33% of the eligible population didn’t vote.

I suspect the election which will technically end six weeks from today will feature turnout numbers that look more like 2016 than 2020. I wouldn’t even be surprised to see voter participation drop back below 60%, given what I think of as the Trump Exhaustion Effect, where people who are only marginally connected to politics tune out because they’ve come to be bored by both nascent fascism as reality TV, and the resistance to rebooting the program.

There are any number of reasons that would explain why someone may be less interested in politics. Chief among them is time. “Being deeply involved in politics requires time, and for many, time may be a difficult-to-attain luxury — or it may be time that they wish to spend in other ways on things like their family or their careers,” they write. Partisan polarization is real — and the strong dislike of partisans for the other side is even more real — but journalistic impressions notwithstanding, it’s less equally distributed across the entire population than concentrated among the deeply involved.

If the most fundamental divide in U.S. political life is between “a minority of Americans who are deeply involved in politics” and “the majority of Americans who have much less investment in day-to-day political outcomes,” then the undecided voter is a little less harder to understand. They may simply belong to that majority of Americans who would rather spend their time and devote their attention to something other than politics.

But to have interests other than politics, to be less involved, is not to be disengaged. People in this position have preferences; they care about outcomes; they want to participate, when it’s appropriate, in the political process. “The distinction between the deeply involved and everyone else,” Krupnikov and Ryan observe, “is about the politics that happens between elections and major crises: the myriad governing details, debates and supposed scandals that emerge on a near-daily basis.”

The undecided voter has tuned out the noise of American politics and continues to tune it out until the minute, or even the moment, at which she has to make a decision.

As much as this dynamic is frustrating to those of us who have never had to decide because we’ve already made up our minds, the loose attachment to politics and political life isn’t necessarily an evil. “One can be civically competent through a reliance on political cues — which one can glean from more limited exposure to politics,” Krupnikov and Ryan write. You don’t need to be a news and political obsessive to be an informed voter and a good citizen. And remember, to be deeply involved is to be polarized.

This of course is what four years ago I dubbed the Ariana Grande vote, and, very roughly speaking, I think it makes up around one third of the potential voting population. Another third is made up of people who definitely aren’t even going to vote, so they aren’t even marginally connected to politics to the extremely limited sense that voting in a presidential election represents. And then one third are the “deeply involved,” although in LGM world we should remember that what constitutes deep involvement will often look like what having gone to a total of six of the original nine Star Wars movies looks like to somebody who wears a Wookie suit to a Star Trek convention.

As. Bouie points out, this isn’t all bad. The glass half full perspective is reflected in what I said about the Ariana Grande voters, back when I realized I knew a total of maybe five things about Ariana Grande:

And here’s my happy thought: While there’s no denying there are millions of fanatical supporters of Donald Trump’s ethno-nationalist griftomatic Fascism for Dummies (redundant obviously), there are many, many more Trump voters who are like me and Ariana Grande. They don’t know really know anything about politics. They don’t really pay attention. They’ve heard a few things here and there, but that’s it pretty much it.

I’m not letting these people off the hook by any means. After all in the end the analogy eventually breaks down: if I don’t know anything about Ariana Grande that’s a trivial consequence of the typical demographics of pop music consumption. If the people voting to put and keep President Authoritarian Imbecile in office are doing so largely out of ignorance, indifference, and inertia, as opposed to a deep commitment to the horrendous values represented by both Trumpism and the contemporary Republican party (a distinction without a difference at this point), that’s still an incredibly damning indictment of both them and the political culture that produces and nurtures their ignorance, indifference, and inertia.

But it’s still a lot better than the alternative possibility.

I could be wrong. I could be badly understating the typical level of commitment to Trumpism among typical Trump voters. I can definitely imagine that’s the case.

I would prefer not to.