U.S.-POLITICS: Choice of Presidential Candidates Bores Voters

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 18 1996 (IPS) - The returns on the U.S. presidential elections are already in, and the results are nearly unanimous: the choice between President Bill Clinton and challenger Bob Dole is boring.

Several recent polls indicate that fewer than half of the registered voters will bother to go to the polls on Nov. 5, down from the of eligible voters who turned out in 1992.

Only twice before in U.S. history have elections drawn fewer than half of all registered voters, although the 1988 contest in which George Bush beat Michael Dukakis barely attracted more than 50 percent of those eligible to vote.

More important, with Clinton riding high in the polls as an incumbent with a favourable economy behind him, many voters think that neither Republican candidate Dole nor third-party challengers, which include the Reform Party’s Ross Perot or the Green Party’s Ralph Nader, has a chance of winning.

In a poll this week by Time magazine and CNN, 80 percent of respondents said they felt Clinton is most likely to win the election, while only 12 percent said Dole would win. Yet out of the 2,007 people polled, just 53 percent said they would vote for Clinton, compared to 35 percent for Dole and 7 percent for Perot.

Nor is the feeling that Dole cannot win a new occurrence.

“Pretty much consistently since spring, two-thirds or more (of those polled) think Bill Clinton is going to win the election,” Gallup Polls managing editor Lydia Saad told IPS.

At the same time, Saad cautioned, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the voters think Dole cannot win, only that he is less likely to do so. But, after months of trailing Clinton badly in all polls, including in seven of the country’s eight most populous states, many voters have thrown in the towel.

“Why bother?” one New York voter said with a shrug when asked about the Nov. 5 election. “Clinton is just going to win anyway.”

“It clearly looks like Clinton is going to win,” agreed Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a Washington-based think tank. “For an election in a period where there’s not an economic crisis, it’s not surprising that people tune out.”

Many Democrats and Republicans fear that the apathy generated by the presidential race may depress voter turnout for all elections, thus affecting campaigns critical for the control of Congress.

But George Stephanopoulos, a top White House adviser, denies that the administration worries that the election lacks excitement.

“Boring is good,” he said last week, following the first Clinton-Dole debate last. “We like boring.”

Yet there could be some consequences if, as is widely expected, Clinton wins re-election without voters getting excited about any particular issues.

If the vote is not seen as a referendum on particular issues, Borosage warned, Clinton and the Congress likely will pursue the status quo policies of free trade, budget balancing, and cutting of federal programmes and benefits.

“There’s not much on which to have a mandate,” Borosage said. “I think you’re going to see four years of pure establishment politics.”

Neither Clinton nor Dole, argued syndicated columnist Meg Greenfield, has done enough to convince voters that it will make much of a difference who wins the election.

“I think this is not an election that bores people so much as the election that people actively, anxiously and even a little frenetically don’t want to think about,” she wrote in ‘The Washington Post’ this week.

“It is generating something quite different from boredom: humming to drown out the sound, habitual looking the other way, discomfort, flight,” Greenfield said. Voters, she contended, are embarrassed, more than usual, with the major parties.

Meanwhile, many of the issues voters say they care about have faded from view. In their two debates, Clinton and Dole agreed on the basic direction of the U.S. economy and on favouring the private sector over “big government.”

Yet, as John Sweeney, president of the American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), argued, “America is becoming edgier, angrier and meaner…because of the wealth gap.”

The buying power of U.S. families has dropped by 25 percent over the past two decades, Sweeney noted, while corporate profits have risen by 205 percent since 1980. Yet, although the labour leader disparages such policies, the unions have united this year behind Clinton, a centrist Democrat who embraces free trade and has frequently shunned organised labour.

At the same time, Borosage said, the Republican takeover of both houses of Congress in 1994 has spawned a backlash, with voters tired of cuts in government spending. As a result, he continued, they are embracing Clinton this time around, although with little real passion.

What discontent has been seen in this election has hovered mostly at the margins, with Republican commentator Pat Buchanan attacking free trade and immigration in his primary fight against Dole, while consumer advocate Ralph Nader has run a quixotic independent campaign from the centre-left.

That discontent may add some excitement to future elections. But this one, if polls indicate anything, will remain boring to the end.