America is becoming a democracy in name only 

The Wall Street Journal on Monday finally voiced the media industry’s biggest fear: for all its promise of drama and conflict, the 2024 election is proving to be remarkably uninteresting.  

On the surface, this year’s rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump has all the makings of a high-stakes battle for the presidency, with the candidates on track to spend a record $12 billion on political advertising. But voter interest is plunging past historic lows and both Biden and Trump face a sizable swath of disaffected voters within their own parties. If that’s not enough, polls now indicate fewer voters are paying attention to the campaign today than did two months ago — another grim first for American democracy. 

Voter disengagement is a clear sign that regular Americans don’t feel served by their current political leaders. It’s easy to understand why most voters take one look at politics and simply change the channel.  

Trump is once again embracing the explicit language of Nazi Germany, to the point that a video shared on his Truth Social account this week includes a reference to Hitler’s “unified Reich.” This isn’t even the first time the ex president has cribbed language from Nazi leaders; back in December, Trump accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” — another bit of unapologetic blood-and-soil rhetoric. 

The GOP’s open embrace of its Nazi sympathizer elements has driven not only young people but also long-time Republican voters out of the political process. And who can blame them? It’s tough to be a self-respecting Texas Republican when the state party publicly refused to ban associations with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. For the quarter of conservative voters who find Trump’s Nazi-curiousness a dealbreaker, there’s little incentive to even pay attention. 

At times even Trump seems uninterested in building the kind of bombastic and all-consuming media blitz that defined his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. He has spent much of the last month stuck in New York for his criminal trial, and he seems loath to spend his moments of free time on the campaign trail. If Republicans’ presumptive nominee isn’t even interested in campaigning, why should voters care what’s happening on the trail?  

There’s also the troubling reality that when voters think about the 2024 election, the prospect of political violence is never far from their minds. Last month the Council on Foreign Relations Center for Preventive Action released a contingency planning memorandum about the importance of preventing “destabilizing” U.S. election violence.  

Fears of election violence aren’t contained to elite circles like CFR. Six in 10 Texas voters expect to see post-election violence. So do a majority of Massachusetts voters and a near-majority (49 percent) of voters nationwide. Those voters no longer feel safe participating in the political process, and many have indicated they won’t vote at all for fear of being caught up in potential unrest. A representative democracy where the people no longer feel safe exercising their vote is a representative democracy in name only. 

From the increasingly stark divide over Biden’s handling of the Gaza conflict to the growing prevalence of fascist rhetoric on the right, both political parties are now divided between an extreme core and a much larger ring of disaffected voters who have dropped out of the process entirely. History tells us that allowing either extreme to dictate party ideology will result in a disastrous turn away from good government. Unfortunately, neither candidate seems to have a plan to win back the swelling ranks of politically disillusioned Americans. 

Our system of government depends on engaged and informed voters casting their ballots for representative leaders. That system is buckling under the nihilism of GOP leaders and ineffectual pushback from the Democrats and exiled Republicans who still believe in democracy. Without a positive reason to believe in our system, near-record numbers of voters are planning to stay home. Is there a leader in either party capable of bringing them back? 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.