IN A "TUNE-OUT" ELECTION, WILL THE CANDIDATE WITH THE LEAST TUNED-OUT BASE WIN?

After Richard Nixon's landslide win in the 1972 presidential election, Pauline Kael, the New Yorker film critic, didn't really say, “How did Nixon win? I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” Here's what she actually said:

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.

The real Pauline Kael understood that Nixon voters were real, even if she didn't know them personally. This post, from Vanity Fair's Brian Stelter, feels as if it was written by the Pauline Kael of legend:

This column is about political burnout. You’re probably feeling it....

Iowa caucus turnout numbers were weak. Ratings for the cable news coverage of the results were soft. Two primary debates ahead of New Hampshire were canceled. And these trend lines aren’t going to suddenly turn around. The prospect of a rematch between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump is, for untold millions, the worst kind of rerun. In poll after poll, Americans are saying that they are underwhelmed by the 2024 candidates and unhappy about the political system as a whole. Some are terribly angry and motivated to vote (and door-knock and donate) but many are just tired.

So they’re “tuning out,” to borrow a phrase the Pew Research Center chose for the title of a recent report on the matter.

But is everybody tuning out? As Alex Thompson and Erin Doherty of Axios point out today, supporters of one major-party candidate are much more enthusiastic about the November election than supporters of the other:

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll this month found that 44% of GOP primary voters were "very enthusiastic" about Trump, while only 18% of Democratic primary voters said the same about Biden.

Are people who'll vote enthusiastically this year simply outside Stelter's ken?

Thompson and Doherty add:

An NBC poll in November found that 63% of Biden voters were more against Trump than for Biden.

The point of their piece is that some Democrats are rooting for Trump to lock up the Republican nomination early, because many voters simply haven't grasped that Trump will be the GOP nominee:

The president's campaign has internal data indicating that most of the undecided voters Biden is targeting don't think Trump will be the Republican nominee because they haven't tuned into an election that's more than nine months away.

That's led Biden's team to believe the dynamics of the campaign will change significantly once those voters realize it really will be a Biden-Trump matchup in November....

I hope they're right. According to 2020 exit polling, 44% of Biden voters chose him because they disliked Trump, while only 22% of Trump voters said they were primarily casting an anti-Biden vote. I'd be happy to win that way again.

But why aren't voters focused on the near-inevitability of a Trump primary victory, and alarmed as a result? For several reasons.

First, the mainstream media continues to say that Trump might lose -- or did, at least, until a day or two ago. The right-wing press occasionally suggests that someone other than Joe Biden might be the Democratic nominee -- a few days ago, for instance, a preposterous Cindy Adams column in the New York Post alleged that there's a stealth campaign under way to nominate Michelle Obama -- but on the right, the message is that it simply doesn't matter who the Democratic nominee is, because all Democrats are part of the same sinister cabal, and you'd better be sure to vote unless you want a country run by undocumented immigrants, socialist transsexuals, and the World Economic Forum.

Democrats simply don't talk about Republicans the way Republicans talk about Democrats, so Biden's recent polling weakness can probably be ascribed in part to the perception that Republicans other than Trump are perfectly nice and could be fine presidents.

Democrats don't attack the opposition party every day because most prominent Democrats worry that they'll need Republican cooperation in order to govern. Most Republicans don't worry much about governing, and even those who do, like Mike Johnson and previous Republican House speakers, assume they can insult Democrats all they want and still receive Democratic cooperation when it's time, say, to avoid shutting down the government. (They're right.)

Democrats' fear of not having governing partners when necessary prevents them from creating negative impressions of the GOP. This helps the GOP in every election -- voters go to the polls not really thinking about the fact that the GOP is the party of unlimited guns or anti-abortion extremism or endless tax cuts for the rich. It almost seems as if agreeing to cooperate on governing occasionally is a Republican ruse to keep Democrats from telling the truth about how awful Republicans are. It works. Republicans do really well at the polls given how unpopular most of their policy positions are -- and how unpopular their party leader is. That could change, but only if Democrats start to close the demonization gap.