Voter Disengagement Quotes

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

The biggest threat to the Trump movement is that Republicans in office demoralize our base because the only way we win now is by driving turnout among our voters. And if our voters just think we're weak, we don't fight, we don't do the things we say when we get elected? Then there is no future for us.

The danger of democracy has always been the danger of an electorate seized by passivity.

One of the reasons why voters are turned off is the process [of modern presidential campaigns].

Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, discovery of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

it is a universal practice in the popular elections in all these states, to give no legal consideration whatsoever to those who do not choose to vote, as against the effect of the votes of those, who do choose to vote. Hence it is not the qualified voters, but the qualified voters, who choose to vote, that constitute the political power of the state.

Elections aren't just about who votes but who doesn't vote.

People aren't as stupid as the politicians think. More and more of us are laughing off our 'civic duty' to vote, rejecting the role of compulsory constituent.

I think most Americans don't really care about politicians bickering in Washington.

There's a great public disinclination toward politicians.

All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.

We have for the past year and undoubtedly will be for the next year, dealing with an electorate that is more alienated and more cynical than at any point in modern time.

The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.

I sense that conservatives have largely already tuned out to the coming elections, after six years of burgeoning federal spending and inaction on key issues, such as immigration. The Republican Party has become the party of the government status quo, and conservatives see no reason to reward it with their votes.

Everywhere, you have a fatigue for reform... that's very serious.

I have no temptation to vote, to campaign, to try and stop a candidate who promises new follies.

So much of what passes for public life consists of little more than candidates without ideas, hiring consultants without conviction, to stage campaigns without content. The result, increasingly, is elections without voters.

We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or truth or what's happening.