U.S. voter apathy turning out to be a myth

By Paul Alexander

NEW YORK (Bloomberg): Americans, the pundits say, don't care about politics. The media takes pleasure in nothing that in recent presidential elections voter turnout has declined. We are told that inferior candidates are to blame, or negative campaigning, or a lack of compelling issues, or voter cynicism.

"Nobody cares about the presidential election this time around," one book publisher said recently. "It just won't hold the public's attention."

Like so many pronouncements made by the media, this couldn't be further from the truth.

So far in the 2000 presidential election cycle, the public has shown unprecedented interest in both the Democratic and Republican races. As a result, in the fall, because the parties are clearly staking out their divergent positions on pivotal issues and because there is no incumbent president running for only the third time since 1960, we will have the most spirited campaign since Kennedy vs. Nixon.

Consider the facts. A record 23,685 ballots were cast in Iowa's Republican state party straw poll in August, compared to 10,598 ballots in 1995 when Senators Robert Dole and Phil Gramm tied. In the 1999 straw poll, Texas Governor George W. Bush beat publisher Steve Forbes and presaged the Bush win in the January Iowa caucus, which produced its own record turnout.

On the Democratic side, Vice President Al Gore crushed former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley in the Iowa caucus -- also with a huge turnout.

Then, the Feb. 2 New Hampshire primary produced record voting on both the Democratic and Republican sides. A squeaker victory for Gore over Bradley was upstaged by a stunning landslide win for Arizona Senator John McCain over Bush. Shocked by McCain's 18-point margin, the Bush campaign unleashed a vicious assault on the senator ahead of last Saturday's South Carolina primary.

Push-poll telephone banks called voters and questioned McCain's character. Anti-abortion and pro-gun groups supportive of Bush inundated local radio with ads attacking McCain's positions on these issues, even though McCain is "pro-life" and has often voted in line with the National Rifle Association.

According to people in the McCain camp, flyers attributed to the Bush campaign were sent out that made unsubstantiated attacks on the senator and his wife, Cindy. One, according to these people, referred to Cindy McCain's onetime addiction to painkillers which she began taking after back surgery. She had previously admitted to the addiction.

Negative campaigning drives down voter turnout, the pundits say. Not in South Carolina, though. With McCain matching the Bush assault by running the now-famous and short-lived commercial that said Bush "twisted the truth like Bill Clinton," voters went to the polls in record numbers. An astonishing 576,000-plus people voted -- roughly twice the number that went to the polls in the 1996 Republican primary. (The Democrats did not have a South Carolina primary.)

McCain's incendiary attack on Bush in his election night speech in Charleston -- "I will never take the lowest road to the highest office," he told his disheartened but cheering supporters -- was said to signal the beginning of the end of the McCain effort, maybe even turning off voters in Michigan. Instead, on Tuesday voters lined up in Michigan, again, in record numbers. With McCain getting about 646,744 votes and Bush 547,939, according to the New York Times, more than a million people voted in the Republican primary in a year that's supposed to be defined by complacency and indifference.

In 2000, voters are anything but dispassionate. They are engaged in the issues, often asking candidates painfully detailed questions in town meetings. They are interested in the candidates, one reason McCain's autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks. They are passionate about the race between the four men running for president. And they want to know what each might do if elected.

This excitement was evident on the final day of McCain's campaign in South Carolina. At a morning rally at the College of Charleston, a few thousand students and older people packed the school's gym and cheered wildly for McCain, as he likes to say, "as if I were a rock star." Later that day, he received a similar welcome at a rally attended mostly by veterans in Litchfield Beach. Finally, well after dark, 1,000 people stood in the parking lot of the Nascar Cafe in Myrtle Beach to listen to McCain say, one more time, that in November he'll "beat Al Gore like a drum."

Monday night, Bradley tried to do some pounding of his own when he and Gore squared off in a debate at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

What was remarkable about the event was all the celebrities who attended. On hand were Whoopi Goldberg, Star Jones, Spike Lee, Phil Jackson, and others. The glitterati showed up in Harlem as they would for a Broadway opening or a charity gala, only this was a debate in a political season that is supposed to be dead.

On Monday night the Apollo was the place to be in New York, if not the country, and the proceedings were electric. The fireworks that erupted between Gore and Bradley proved that politics, which sometimes resembles a contact sport as former Texas Governor Ann Richards often points out, can be every bit as entertaining as, say, a basketball game. Even Spike Lee was behaving more as if he was at a Knicks game than a presidential debate.

But don't tell that to the pundits. It will upset their theory that nobody cares about politics.