The context for the Excerpt
The excerpt I have attached below is from an essay I submitted for my College 101 Writing Seminar class. It was assigned with us with freedom of topic, required an annotated bibliography, and had to be at least 10 pages long. As you can see in the PDF below, I expanded well beyond those minimums, as the topic is one I am very passionate about. The topic of Political Polarization and Voter Turnout was a topic I wanted to write about because I want to eventually work in a field that limits the impacts polarization has on our society and voting electorate. I wanted to know how and why polarization and voter turnout trends positively correlate and what implications this will have on future presidential elections.
Excerpt
“For Trump, tarnishing Hillary’s reputation was the best strategy in this climate to win the election. His ability to make her appear like the worst of the two was a winning strategy as he just needed to chip off her Democratic majority and scare enough independents into turning out against her. Ultimately, this strategy was successful and led to him becoming the U.S.’s 45th president. This is the clearest national electoral example of how to win by increasing voter turnout, by using political partisanship to drive moderate, seemingly ideologically unaligned voters into focusing on voting against who they disliked the most.
However, as time went on and the 2024 election cycle came about, Trump had made many major mistakes that never allowed his approval rating to get to a majority of the population. When Trump left office, in January 2021 his disapproval rating was a whopping 57.4% (Silver, 2021). This set him up for failure in the 2024 cycle because a majority of voters already knew they did not like him. Biden, on the other hand, due to his familial ties with the relatively popular 44th President of the United States Barack Obama, led the public to have a relatively positive, non-negative perception of him. Whereas Trump continued to make mistakes, in regards to Covid-19, Black Lives Matter Movements, and other defining moments of the year 2020. Biden ran a low-key, scandal-free campaign. Overall, an incredible 56% of voters cast their votes for Biden because he was not Trump, and there went the election(Gilberstadt et al., 2020).
Ultimately, what the tale of the past two elections reflects is that voters are using their ideologies, and therefore identities, not to vote in support of candidates, but rather against them. As found by Pew Research, “more than half of Democrats (55%) say the Republican Party makes them “afraid,” while 49% of Republicans say the same about the Democratic Party” (Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016, 2019). This new process of politicizing elections to vote against parties or candidates is a reason why polarization has increased: fear and hate are the driving factors. People are more likely to turn out and vote out of fear due to the fact that fear engenders stronger feelings than liking a candidate. Fear and hate also have a hand in making a voter less likely to be open to changing their mind or opinion on a candidate or given topic (The Most Powerful Emotion in Marketing May Surprise You — and More Brands Need to Tap into It, According to an Expert in Social Influencer Marketing, 2019).
This is incredibly important to acknowledge and apply to future elections. Candidates who want to win at the national level, especially the presidency, must now work to mobilize the fear in voters against the other candidate in order to win. This method will not be leaving our political system anytime soon, due to the usefulness of it. As much as many voters would like politics to ‘return to normal and for candidates to be respectful towards each other, it is no longer a winning strategy. Whoever runs against Joe Biden in 2024 (he has already announced he would run) will need to mobilize the fear of ideologically Republican-leaning voters in order to beat him. This will be a challenging task to muster due to the success that Joe Biden has had to lead us out of the Covid-19 pandemic and the worst recession since the 2008 Housing Bubble burst. The days of nice politicking are over, and for better or for worse, at least on a national political level. President Trump’s fear stroking tactics worked and have proven the massive success it can have at a national level. Therefore, we must be prepared for much more partisan animus to come between voters, politicians, and political parties in the years to come (Partisan Antipathy: More Intense, More Personal, 2019)”
To read the full paper, I have attached the link below:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IWn2hcCkc4YZmNfZLNmS233085X-RKcT8dRTLXH-8Ps/edit?usp=sharing