Meet the Ostrich Voters
5 min read
When Bryan Jarrell, an Evangelical pastor in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, came across an election-themed episode of a podcast, he’d skip right over it. He would mute the TV when political ads came on, tried to teach his social-media feeds that he wasn’t interested in politics, and would throw campaign mailers straight in the trash. He’d skim news headlines sometimes, but if he could tell that the story was about national politics, he’d keep scrolling.
Today, exactly one week before the election, he will begin researching both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and make a decision about whom to support. He’s not sure where he’ll land—he is conservative on some social issues, but he doesn’t like Trump’s character.
Jarrell represents a set of Americans who, out of anxiety, exhaustion, or discouragement, are mostly tuning out campaign coverage yet will ultimately participate in the election. They’re political ostriches who, at the last minute, will take their head out of the sand. “For a decade now, people have started talking about news fatigue,” Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst, told me. “People are tired of being bombarded with the news. And then it kind of matured into news avoidance.” This tendency escalated with the increasing ubiquity of both online news and Donald Trump, Doctor said.
Jarrell started purposefully ignoring campaign coverage after he noticed that his parishioners would come to him in the lead-up to elections and describe genuine fear about one candidate or the other taking the White House. He decided to recommend this strategy, of abstaining from the news until the final week of the race, to his parishioners, and to follow it himself.
“How much energy did America collectively spend imagining a Biden-Trump election only in July to have Biden drop out?” Jarrell said to me. “If you wait ’til the last week, that’s still enough time to make an informed decision, but you haven’t wasted all that emotional energy stressing about something that may not even come to pass.”
A sizable percentage of Americans seems to feel similarly. A 2022 Reuters Institute report found that 42 percent of Americans “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” up from 38 percent in 2017. The most common reasons people gave for avoiding the news were that it focused too much on politics and COVID, that it was biased, or that it made them feel unhappy or fatigued. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of Americans were already worn out by coverage of campaigns and candidates. A May poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 49 percent of those surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I’m tired of receiving and processing news about the 2024 presidential election.” Not caring about politics is a hallmark of what political scientists call “low information” citizens, but unlike many in the low-information camp, political ostriches do intend to vote. They just don’t feel the need to follow the news in order to do so.
The reason ostriches and others avoid political news is simple: “It’s all negative; it’s divisive; I’m sick of it,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me, relaying the views she hears in focus groups.
In Jacksonville, Florida, 31-year-old Tawna Barker didn’t watch the debates, and on social media, she scrolls past political news, skipping what she feels are “inflammatory, heavily one-sided articles.” She plans to vote for a third-party candidate. “Neither [Trump nor Harris] really seems like they’re actually going to do anything to help us,” she told me.
Barker, who in 2016 supported Bernie Sanders, seemed disappointed by the fact that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee that year. “Whoever’s running stuff behind the scenes is just gonna pick who they want to pick, and we just have to go along with it,” she said.
Cheryl Wilson Obermiller, a 66-year-old near Kansas City, Missouri, told me that she and her husband have swapped watching the news for taking walks or watching, say, Masterpiece Theater. She finds the news inflammatory, addictive, and occasionally insulting to people like her—she’s voting for Trump. She asks herself, “Am I wasting time watching politics when I could be helping my neighbor? And I think that’s something we all have to consider. Am I watching politics that are feeding in me an attitude that would make me look down on or dislike people?”
Obermiller still spends about an hour a day either reading or watching the news, down from about four to six hours several years ago. She gets the news that she does consume through Facebook groups and from Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld, “because I think he’s funny, even though a lot of times he says things that I kind of laugh about but I think are kind of mean,” she said.
Ignoring political news has become easier in recent years. Nearly half of Americans don’t subscribe to any news sources. Those seeking to dodge campaign coverage can choose to spend their time on apolitical TikToks and Instagram reels, and watch Netflix instead of CNN. “For people who are not interested in politics, which is most people, it’s actually easier than ever to not watch news shows, to not have the algorithm in your social-media feeds give you political information,” David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, told me.
Broockman found in a recent study that just 15 percent of Americans watch at least eight hours of “partisan” TV, such as Fox or MSNBC, each month. “However little you think voters care about politics, you will still always overestimate how much they care,” Broockman said. This helps explain why both Trump and Harris are appearing on podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy—they’re trying to get around people’s “I hate politics” filters.
If people are tuning out, it might not matter much for the election results. Most people already know whom they’re going to vote for; the universe of truly undecided voters is very small—likely less than 15 percent of the electorate. “The vast, vast, vast majority of voters settle into who they’re voting for, for whatever reasons they are, and then that’s kind of that, and there’s no information that they can get that is going to bump them off,” Dan Judy, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, told me. “There’s really a small number in most political campaigns of voters who are truly persuadable.” The willfully tuned-out will likely end up voting for whichever party they’ve always supported, but they will have suffered less agita in the process.
Jarrell, the pastor, feels that his approach to the news has made him more serene, and has given him more time to focus on his church and his family. “I believe that there’s a loving God in control of the universe,” he said, “and no matter who’s in the Oval Office, God’s still in heaven. And things are going to be okay.” That’s a hope he shares, surely, with Americans of all political persuasions.
