This may come as a surprise: Americans are fed up with politics, poll finds

By DAVID BAUDER and LINLEY SANDERS, The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — As a Democrat who immersed himself in it political news during the presidential campaign, Ziad Aunallah has a lot in common with many Americans since the election. It stopped.

“People are mentally exhausted,” said Aunallah, 45, of San Diego. “Everybody knows what’s coming and we’re just taking some time off.”

Television ratings – and now a new survey – clearly illustrate the phenomenon. About two-thirds of American adults say they have recently felt the need to limit their media consumption about politics and government because of overload. poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Smaller percentages of Americans limit their news intake about overseas conflicts, the economy or climate change, the survey found. Politics stands out.

Election news on CNN and MSNBC was taking up too much of Sam Gude’s time before the election, said the 47-year-old electrician from Lincoln, Nebraska. “The last thing I want to watch now is the interregnum,” said Gude, a Democrat and no fan of President-elect Donald Trump.

The poll shows that more Democrats than Republicans are turning away from the news

The poll, conducted in early December, found that about 7 in 10 Democrats say they are withdrawing from political news. The percentage is not as high for Republicans, who have reason to celebrate Trump’s victory. Still, about 6 in 10 Republicans say they’ve felt the need to take time off, and the share of independents is similar.

The differences are much larger for television networks that have been consumed by political news.

After election night through Dec. 13, MSNBC’s prime-time audience averaged 620,000, down 54 percent from the pre-election audience this year, the Nielsen company said. For the same time comparison, CNN’s average of 405,000 viewers was down 45%.

At Fox News Channel, a favorite news network for Trump fans, the post-election average of 2.68 million viewers was up 13 percent, Nielsen said. Since the election, 72 percent of those watching one of the three cable networks in the evening watched Fox News, compared to 53 percent before Election Day.

A post-election slump in fans of the losing candidate is not a new trend for networks that have become strongly identified with partisan audiences. MSNBC had similar problems after Trump was elected in 2016. So did Fox in 2020, though that was complicated by anger: Many of its viewers were outraged then by the network’s crucial election-night call in Arizona for the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, and looked for alternatives.

MSNBC had its own anger issues after several “Morning Joe” viewers were upset about it hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited Trump shortly after his victory last month. However, while the show’s ratings are down 35% since Election Day, that’s a smaller drop than the network’s primetime ratings.

CNN points out that while it suffered in television ratings, its streaming and digital ratings were consistent.

The survey of 1,251 adults was conducted between December 5-9, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the US population. The margin of sampling error for adults is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.