The Apathy Election: Political Engagement Dropped Dramatically In 2024
(ANALYSIS) I have hunches about things, often based on vibes or anecdotes or my own created realities. We all do. It’s just part of being a human being.
We see two or three tweets or news headlines about something, and that makes us think in a very specific way about the world. But here’s what's awesome about my job — I can actually test those hunches with real data.
That’s really the engine that drives this whole newsletter: me just trying to figure out how wrong I am about something happening in the world.
When I think about the 2024 election, the biggest sentiment that comes to my mind is a simple malaise. When Trump burst on to that scene about a decade ago, he immediately stirred up an opposition that was really excited to oppose him at every turn.
I remember reading news stories about how he managed to drive his casinos into bankruptcy, cheat vendors out of their negotiated payments and commit adultery against his wives. It’s like the media dug up every skeleton about Trump and plastered it all over our social media apps for years.
Then, two things happened. They ran out of dirt to dig up, and the public just couldn’t get outraged anymore.
That’s where we were in November of 2024. It’s like all the momentum went out of the room and it was impossible to get it back. And guess what? That’s exactly the story that emerges from the data.
Let me show you how much religious groups engaged in political activity in 2024. This is the standard battery employed by the Cooperative Election Study for years.
When it comes to attending a political meeting, like for the school board or city council, that was a rare occurrence in 2024. The most engaged group were Jews, but only 14% had gone to a meeting in the previous month.
Almost every Christian group was in the single digits: 8% of White evangelicals and 9% of white Catholics were attending a local meeting. And that was also the case with participating in a protest or march.
About 11% of Jews took part in one, and 19% of Muslims marched for a political cause (I am guessing that was something to do with Israel and Hamas but I can’t say for certain). But among most other groups it was incredibly rare: Less than 5% were protesting.
Now there were some activities that saw quite a bit more engagement. For instance, there were several groups where at least 20% of people had contacted a public official. That was also generally the case for donating money to a candidate or campaign during the presidential election.
On that metric only two groups had a donation rate that was above 30% — Jews and atheists.
But the bottom left graph really sealed it for me. It asked people if they had displayed a political yard sign or bumper sticker — something that takes almost no time at all.
Atheists scored the highest at a measly 20%. There were lots of groups around 15-18%, but that was about the extent of it. You get the point here, right? Engagement was just so incredibly low across the board.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.