Why do political parties and politicians insist on running the same deadly vanilla kind of campaigns year after year, campaign after campaign? Why do they focus on the same “safe” issues, attack the same supposed enemies, say pretty much the same thing over and over again, even when it’s apparent that nobody is listening? And why is it that, with each election cycle, we find fewer and fewer people bothering to go to the polls on election day?
The answer is boredom.
And that boredom is the result of a voting pool that no longer cares about the message and certainly, doesn’t care about the messenger. Everything we read tells us that the great center of interest is no longer where the interest of the public lies. People want answers the the issues of 2014 and beyond. They are not finding leadership in their politicians because their politicians are following a template that has been out of date for about twenty years.
People are interested in specific questions, not generalities, and today’s politicians are responding in exactly the way their predecessors did–with turgid, stock answers, and generalized pabulum. Voters are responding by decrying all parties and all present leadership, Democratic and Republican.
Until politicians recognize that voters are living in a digital world where information is easy to get and almost impossible to hide–and until they realize that engaged citizens want specifics, not fairytales–the numbers of registered party members will continue to decline, and voter apathy will continue to soar.
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