What if independent voters don't want to be swayed?

There's a kind of political meiosis happening, in which both parties get stupider, and independents are tired of being bombarded by half-brained idiocy.

Flush with cash to burn, the Biden campaign has unveiled a $50 million ad campaign to hurt your eyeballs with ads centered on Donald Trump’s felony convictions. Biden’s braintrust wants to define the race on its terms in advance of any face-to-face debate between Trump and the president.

Meanwhile, in the real world, President Biden appeared on stage with former president Barack Obama at a fundraiser on Saturday. At the end of the event, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Biden stood on stage, either basking in the applause, or—as Republicans saw it—freezing up. Obama gently took his elder by the wrist, and guided him, with a hand to the shoulder, off stage. The New York Post went with the “freeze up” headline, while Obama adviser Eric Schultz posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter, “this did not happen.”

Also, in the real world, Trump met with about 100 corporate CEOs, including Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Walmart CEO Doug McMillan. The Wall Street Journal described the meeting as “Top CEOs Are Flocking to Trump Again” while CNBC went with “Ex-president ‘meandering’ and ‘doesn’t know what he’s talking about’.” Trump’s communication director Steven Cheung replied with: “President Trump was warmly received by everyone in the room and was commended for his policy proposals on deregulation and tax cuts.”

Republicans are going to see these events as a brain-addled Biden freezing and having to be led by Obama, whom they believe is really running things in this country anyway, while Trump wowed CEOs with tax cuts, despite Democrats trying to make him into a convicted criminal mastermind and also simultaneously a buffoon.

Democrats are going to see the same events as the rabid Trump cult going after a good-hearted, sharp-for-his-80s man who offers an alternative to the nascent dictator being propped up by neo-Nazis, social media idiots and conspiracy flacks.

Independents are tired of all of this.

There’s a biological process called meiosis, where one healthy cell divides twice, once to copy the genetic material, and the daughter cells to divide the material in half, so four cells result, each with half the DNA of the original. In men, these four cells are sperm. In women, one cell becomes an egg, and the other three are discarded.

America is undergoing a political meiosis, where both parties only get half the picture, and activists on both sides are stupider for it. It’s as if, instead of being used to create gametes to make new people through sexual reproduction, meiosis has taken over the whole body, resulting in a deformed abomination.

The remaining healthy cells—independents—see the whole ugly picture, where neither candidate, including the sitting president, is really up to the task of leading this country, working with the other two branches of the federal government, and representing the United State in the bigger world. You’d think that would make independents much more highly motivated to think about this race, but the opposite is true.

A recent Gallup poll, one that the organization has run since at least 2000, tracked “thought given to upcoming presidential election among partisans,” including independents. In this race, at the current time in the cycle, Democrats are more engaged, giving “quite a lot” of thought, than anytime since 2000: 84 percent. Republicans are only slightly lower on the scale, a bit lower than 2020, at 78 percent. Both parties were tied at about 80 percent in 2020.

Note where independents are. Not just the fact that at 61 percent, independents are lower than at any time since 2012, but also note the gap between party affiliated voters and independents. For the last two election cycles, the gap has grown quite wide between both parties and independents. In 2012, independents and Democrats both had similar “thinking” this early in the cycle, leading to a rather low turnout.

In 2020, the engagement went up, much more for Democrats, but a little for independents, leading to much higher turnout—13 points higher than in 2000, a hugely significant number.

Where we are now seems to indicate that turnout will be somewhere around 2020s numbers. But the difference is disaffected independents, who are tired of being bombarded with stupid, divided world meiosis-based content, when the truth is plainly there (and frightening) to see.

The problem is not lost on both campaigns. In North Carolina, where Trump is ahead 5.3% in the RealClearPolling average, Democrats at the local level are exasperated at the lack of engagement by independents. The AP tagged along on a recent late May Saturday:

Purvis, accompanied by an Associated Press reporter on a recent canvassing trip, was near downtown Oxford, the seat of a county of about 62,000 people wedged between Raleigh and the Virginia border, and had knocked on five doors without an answer by the time she got to Cynthia, who declined to give her last name to maintain her privacy.

By the end of a sweltering, breezeless Saturday, Granville County Democrats had knocked on 320 doors in their Memorial Day weekend canvassing campaign. It was the highest amount by any Democratic county party in the state that day.

As of June 7, Democrats had outspent Republicans on advertising in North Carolina by a nearly 4-to-1 margin, according to AdImpact data, and they have far more slots reserved between now and November. They also appear to have dedicated more resources to ground-level efforts such as door-knocking.

That leaves party activists like Purvis feeling optimistic about a state where Trump prevailed twice, though his margin narrowed between 2016 and 2020. The Biden campaign clearly sees an opportunity there and the president already has made three trips to the Tar Heel State this year.

“I’m more hopeful for North Carolina in general than I have been in years past,” Purvis said. “I think Granville County has great potential to be part of that.”

Hope doesn’t spring forth engaged voters. Perhaps money may work, and of course door-knocking is an age-old, tested and true way of winning elections. But there’s more at stake than just the presidential election in swing states, and even in non-battleground states. Turnout will determine many close races around the country.

Political meiosis has made it all but impossible for Republican candidates to rise above the noise level generated by pro-Trump forces, and gaining the coveted Trump endorsement is highly valued. Meanwhile, Democrats struggle to paint any race as something other than using the apocalyptic palette of NeverTrump colors. This has resulted in distorted, disfigured election choices, like North Carolina’s gubernatorial election.

None of this is good news to independents. It’s no wonder many don’t really want to apply much thought to the presidential, or any other, election, because doing so is subjecting oneself to a barrage of stupidity and abominable distortion. Thinking clearly is hard enough without wading into the pool of lies and half-truths.

This leads me to the question in the headline. What if independents don’t want to be swayed? What if all the choices, good or bad, are so wrapped in partisan dumbassery, that it’s not worth giving thought to?

At this point, the presidential race is really still too close to call. But the reality of it is both candidates need to lose. Squaring that reality with the fact that one of them is going to have to win is like trying to decide whether to see a shaman or a medical school dropout to have your cancer treated. You might live, but not because you received proper care. Better not to think too hard about it.

Perhaps, this will be the election that bucks the Gallup trend. I’d like to think more and more Americans won’t be swayed to adopt either party’s half-chromosome view, and will end up with the independents, disgusted by the whole sordid affair. That would lead to depressed turnout (in more than one meaning of the word). It would lead to a message to the parties, who are going to spend a record amount of money on every race: your money is wasted unless you have better products to sell.

I’m not that optimistic, however. People who have given a lot of half-brained thought to the election are not about to grow the other half of a brain in order to escape meiosis. It just doesn’t work that way. It will be up to the next generation of voters to go into this with a whole brain.

Independents like David Thornton, Jay and me will have to wait it out, and hope we live to see a return to full-brained politics. I think, barring some miracle (I believe in miracles!), this cycle is doomed to meiosis.

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