LIFESTYLE: Voters elect to stay engaged

Gannett News Service

April 04, 2008 02:47 pm

— There is no escaping the 2008 presidential election, not just for the candidates but for the rest of us, too.
Any place where people loiter, on bar stools, in chat rooms and around water coolers, the hot topic is the campaign, even among citizens usually indifferent to politics.
The presidential race is authentically electrifying — a wild, hang-on-Martha ride careening across the country with a compelling back story of historic candidates, back-from-the-dead revivals, roller-coaster changes and uncertainty about how it will all turn out.
“It has been a veritable treasure-trove of exciting news every step of the way,” says Krista Grimmett, 41, a civilian employee of the Defense Department at Osan Air Base in South Korea. ”We are Americans living abroad, and we are following this election with a tenacity usually reserved only for the Final Four during March Madness.”
The primary race between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is so competitive, it has even barged into the online universe of the “World of Warcraft” game. Millions of players are supposed to be fighting dragons, raiding enemies and performing magical quests — not discussing superdelegates.
And yet over the past few weeks, “WoW” has been “teeming” with people gabbing about the election, says Sean Goldman, 36, a player from Van Nuys, Calif.
”Here we are, logging into a virtual world to escape the grip of the real world for a few hours, but this election has brought the real world closer to the virtual world,” says Goldman, who was running a “heroic dungeon” (a more challenging level) with a pickup group of players recently when a break in the action led to an online conversation about supporting Obama.
Goldman, a technical director for an entertainment company who has been a casual ”WoW“ player for years, says the exchange was a ”true testament” to how compelling the campaign has become.
“Hillary and Obama have created quite the buzz with the race, and it’s created a buzz everywhere,” he says. ”I’d say 99 percent of the people talking about this (in the game) are the types who would usually stay away from talking politics because it wasn’t cool.”
Election chatter is a staple of countless individual blogs.
On YouTube, every ripple in the campaign produces a daily torrent of new videos from people who are praising, mocking, analyzing and pontificating.
On Facebook and MySpace, hundreds of pro-Clinton, pro-Obama and pro-Republican John McCain groups and thousands of individuals do battle for support and donations from their peers.
They post messages praising their candidate and attesting to how the campaign is affecting them.
“Obama u are the man! You got my friend to consider voting!” a 23-year-old Washington state man wrote on his MySpace page.
And don’t forget eBay, where the three candidates’ names appear in thousands of auctions; hundreds of people paid up to $1,700 for an Obama poster.
Fodder for the networks
In the pop-culture competition, the campaign still lags. ”American Idol,” for example, typically attracts 30 million viewers a night.
But this election is attracting TV viewers in greater numbers than in past elections, and not just to the comedy shows such as ”Saturday Night Live“ and Jon Stewart’s ”Daily Show“ that extract big laughs out of the foibles of the candidates.
Nearly 8 million people watched a Clinton/Obama debate last month on MSNBC, the cable all-news network that even on a good night rarely attracts one-tenth that number of viewers. The debate also outdrew a new ABC series, ”Quarterlife,“ in the all-important 18- to 24-year-old demographic.
People are actually beating each other up over politics.
In Hickory, N.C., according to police reports, one guy hit another with a baseball bat after they argued during that Clinton/Obama debate.
A year ago, who would have predicted millions more people would prefer to watch two middle-aged politicians than a bunch of nubile twentysomethings on TV?
Who could have imagined scores of readers who typically relax with ”People “or ”Vogue “also might be taking a peek at ”Politico,” the politics-only magazine/Web site that expects the frantic pace to last even beyond the November election.
”If there is a Super Tuesday for American fashion this week, who will notice while election politics are grabbing all the headlines?” complained venerable fashion critic Suzy Menkes in her column in the “International Herald Tribune ”during Fashion Week last month.
“I’ve never seen anything like this race, and we’ve certainly seen that phenomenon play out in people who come to our site,” says Bill Nichols, a longtime political reporter and deputy managing editor at ”Politico.“
He says the combination of historic rivalry, high-stakes issues and rousing story lines will keep the political fever high for the rest of the year. ”So it will likely leave us all exhausted but also will be very good for business.”
No cooling of interest in sight
Political professionals are busy analyzing the high turnout for the primaries and caucuses and the polls measuring how many voters are paying close attention and how early.
“Public interest in the campaign continues to rise and is much higher than at comparable periods in previous presidential elections,” says Scott Keeter, director for survey research for the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.
He says the level of interest now rivals or surpasses interest in the weeks just before November, when interest typically shoots up.
In March, ”44 percent followed news about the campaign very closely, while in mid-October 2004, 46 percent were paying very close attention, and in mid-October 2000, 40 percent were following very closely,” Keeter says.
The rest of the world also is paying attention.
“The whole world is obsessed,” says Keli Goff, 28, political analyst and author of ”Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence“.
”I was interviewed by Norwegian journalists — they knew all the ins and outs. I go to Central America, and people there were discussing the election. My friends from different countries, they’re all engaged in the election.”
Goff says the campaign is such a hot topic because of its historic nature (first woman or first African-American presidential nominee) and the rock-star vibe surrounding Obama.
“Polling data by Suffolk University (in Boston) ... found that 25 percent of black Americans ages 18 to 45 say Obama’s candidacy made them more likely to vote,” she says.
Also, this is first open presidential race in decades with no incumbent from either party.
”There were 20 candidates in the beginning, so no matter what kind of American you identify as, there was someone up there who represents you, and that’s what made them so entertaining,” Goff says.
But the crucial new factor, she says, is the Internet and its ability to change the course of a campaign in an instant by helping candidates spread their message and raise millions quickly, and by magnifying their flubs and missteps.
“It’s the viral tone set by the Internet,” she says. ”This is the YouTube election, where every candidate is just one YouTube-click away from ending (their) candidacy.”
Getting younger
Also important are the 44 million people ages 18 to 29. Half of them are registered to vote, and virtually all of them are wired to one another via the Internet.
MTV has spent 16 years educating this demographic and estimates that about 6 million young people who are eligible to vote for the first time will do so in this election.
“We’ve been tracking the level of interest by this audience for a while, and when we ask how closely they’re monitoring the election, we get 58 percent in 2007 vs. 35 percent in the same period in 2003,” says Ian Rowe, senior vice president of public affairs for MTV.
“They see the stakes as high. Fifty-eight percent of our audience personally knows someone who has fought in Iraq. That’s an astounding statistic, showing that it’s not just an abstract issue.”
MTV began covering politics in the 1992 election with its Choose or Lose campaign. This year, the music network is fielding a Street Team ’08. One young reporter is in every state reporting on the campaign and issues in online blogs and on MTV’s Web site (Think.MTV.com).
”I was worried I wouldn’t find a lot of young people with informed views this early, but nearly everyone I’ve talked to so far has some sort of opinion,” says West Virginia’s Street Teamer, Griffin McElroy, 20, of Huntington, a junior at Marshall University. “I don’t think they would have cared that much in 2004.”
McElroy says his generation has been exposed to politics since they were kindergartners, thanks in part to cable channels such as MTV and Nickelodeon.
”Ours is the first generation to say that, and the first to have political news aimed at us,” he says.
“Most of the young people who take part in campus rallies and join (political) groups realize that what they’re participating in is groundbreaking.”
Not everyone is so impressed with the kind of attention the campaign is getting. Media critic and blogger Jeff Jarvis says one reason people are following politics closely is not because of some outbreak of earnest good citizenship, but because the news media are covering the campaign as if it were a race for the Oscars.
“More engagement in politics is a good thing, but I’m disturbed about the over-dramatization of the election,” Jarvis says.
”The media have treated this as a drama when it’s really not. It’s not some great Shakespeare play or a prime-time sitcom going on here. It’s just about who runs the government. We talk about horse-race-(style) coverage. This is show-biz-(style) coverage.”
On the other hand, pollster Keeter says, “there’s long been a sense among political observers that negative energy is more important than positive energy.
”You can get people fired up for what they’re against more easily than what they’re for.”

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