Terry Prone: Election 2024 has been boring — this week, that could change
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In fifty years of working on general elections, I’ve never seen one like this. Ever. Boring was never a word you’d have applied to any previous general election. But it does appertain in this one. With bells on. Or maybe no bells, because bells would imply either warning or celebration, and neither seems pertinent.
Let’s go further.
Never before has there been a more analysed election, with radio, TV, and newspapers working twice as hard as usual, and podcasts breeding like rabbits. In the old days, journalists lurked and skulked, planning to expose candidates for what they were.
Now, journalists talk to each other on every available platform about statistics, first preferences, and possibilities. Fair dues to them, they try hard. They probably try harder than did their revered predecessors, many of whom thought they’d done a great day’s work if they filed 800 words and appeared on Morning Ireland. But the payoff for today’s hacks? Much poorer. The analogy of flogging a dead horse eagerly offers itself, because commentators are running between platforms lashing opinions out of them in the face of a lack of interest unprecedented in electoral history.
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This lack of interest is not apathy, which is a term of abuse applied by people within the media/political bubble to people outside that bubble when the people outside the bubble act normally. It outrages political nerds to find themselves in a situation where the electorate sends them the message Don’t Care, Won’t Care. All those comments, all that data, all the opinion polls battering down and yet, what the floating voter is doing is exercising their prerogative to find other stuff more interesting than the election.
It would seem, this time around, as if the floating voter wants to float the hell away from the whole thing.
The floating voter is a fascinating human being, not least because they never sink. You can hit them with corruption, scandal, inflation, housing, and health crises and they keep floating, buoyed up by a marvellously, indeed, possibly unique Irish combination of hope and cynicism. They have little in common with each other, except for a shared readiness to stick it to anyone who takes them for granted.
One floating voter pattern, which has been evident for several elections but is pre-eminent, thus far, in General Election 2024, is what might be called Vox Pop Selection Syndrome. Put a hack out there in Upper Riding, Someplace, with a microphone or camera to ask what agitates the voters in that specific constituency, and Vox Pop Selection Syndrome quickly manifests itself.
The floating voters obligingly cite issues of importance, because they’ve been well schooled by opinion polls and mainstream media to accept that these issues are of importance. So they list off topics like housing and health. But, as one baffled radio reporter noted this last week, if you push them on the issues they claim are important, an interesting distinction arises between what they view as important in a general way, and what they personally experience as important, and in a large number of cases, the twain don’t meet.
The floating voter obediently produces housing and healthcare as “issues” but may not have any recently painful experience with either. Or any particular objective in either area they want the new government to achieve, other than doing better in a non-specific way.
Consequently, neither “issue” may in individually real terms be significant enough to motivate their candidate selection or voting pattern. Each is just a thing. Express concern about either thing and you look current. But your knickers may actually be knotted about neither.
Add to that the reality that, this time around, many floating voters are not that pushed. Of course their lives are full of factors that greatly irritate them, but — because they are smart, these floaters — they are well aware of what governments can achieve and what they can’t.
The broad-spectrum allegation that “ah, sure, they’re all the same” drives people within the bubble nuts, but it is legitimate floating voter shorthand for the experience of rarely seeing radical change resulting from a particular party being in power. The floating voter is too busy with real life to be attributing credit to individual parties for rescuing the economy/introducing divorce/equal marriage. Once a social change is achieved, it becomes a given, unowned and unappreciated.
What makes this particular general election interesting — paradoxically because of the ambient boredom level — is the confluence of a bunch of factors. Take housing. That instruction — take housing — offers this columnist a first and probably last opportunity to refer to paraprosdokian, a figure of speech where the second bit of a sentence is unexpected. Like when comedians, back in the day, would say “Take my mother-in-law. Please”. Same with housing. We’ve all been educated beyond bearing on the housing issue. All political parties are promising to build a number of houses immediately if not sooner, and floating voters are going “Yeah? No.”
No, housing is not actually going to decide their vote.
It’s no accident that the Irish Examiner has resorted to commissioning columnists to tell the new government what it should actually be doing. Because when the most exciting thing in an election is one guy most of us have never heard of knocking lumps off another guy we’ve never heard of, it explains why floaters like the one who talked to me on Friday are saying things like: “Nobody’s come near me or into my estate and honestly, what would I be saying to them if they did?
“Yes of course I’m sick of not being contacted by the hospital about my appointment to have a stent removed, but honestly, do I think electing some local candidate is going to fix that? And yes, things are financially tight but I can manage. I don’t think the current lot have done too badly and I don’t hear anyone saying they want change. But then, to be honest with you, I don’t hear any of my friends or neighbours talking about the election at all. Except mothers checking if their kids are going to be off school on the day.”
This election has been boring to different generations for different reasons. Older generations remember when a general election was a moral crusade against evil and evil-doers. Younger generations live in an era where politicians are an extension of the entertainment industry — think of Trump and Boris Johnson. Whether you look at the government or opposition benches, it’s difficult to find anybody whose main USP is entertainment. Clare Daly claiming to be an ideological pal of the Pope was pleasing but not LOL.
The danger in an election as unprecedented in its boredom level is that, towards the end, something blows up that changes the entire ballgame, partly because it’s so notable within the flatness of the territory. Before his unequivocal repeated apologies, it looked as if Simon Harris’s encounter with the carer might be that explosion. This week will decide.