Voter Turnout In American Politics

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Throughout the years of American politics, candidates, especially those seeking the highest office, have created and refined numerous strategies in order to increase their support and clear their path to victory. Among these methods of drawing interest is “negative campaigning”. While negative campaigning is generally defined simply as statements or advertisements that put the focus on an opponent instead of the candidate, its employment has given politics an extremely adverse tone. The strategy, although effective, has effected the American democratic process in a way that cannot be overstated. It is only in response to the political landscape created by negative campaigning that and partisanship and the protest vote have risen drastically, …show more content…
The goal of the American democratic process is to find the best possible leader for the country, yet even when looking at the entire field of options, many people are not inspired or encouraged to support a single candidate. Along with traditionally conservative voters giving voting Clinton in protest of Donald Trump and vice versa, millions of votes were given to third party candidates such as Gary Johnson and Jill Stein (Walker, 2016). Without even counting write in ballots, the urge people felt to support candidates that they disliked, or even a candidate they knew had no legitimate chance of winning in order to spite the others is a bad prospect. This in combination with terrible voter turnout are a sign that there might be some correlation with the increasingly negative tone dominating politics. In 2016 alone, an estimated 95,899,115 voters, or 41.4% of the eligible people in the country chose not to go to the polls at all (Levine, 2016). Many would undoubtedly claim that voter turnout decreased not as a result of negative campaigning and politics, but rather as a result of a loss of hope, faith, and excitement in the political system as a whole. While this claim seems valid, it fails to acknowledge the direct impact that a campaigns has on the perception of politicians. Perhaps it is not the actual tone that has upset and dismayed possible voters, but the terrible perception that Americans now have for the potential leaders of the country is undoubtedly a large factor in their opinions of the system as a whole. In essence, the ugly truth is that, for some Americans, voting is no longer about choosing the best candidate, but rather the lesser of two
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