Campaign fatigue got you down? But we only just finished the primary campaign’s 13th Republican debate, and there’s so much politicking still to come.
The 2012 election is officially just getting started — with Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses just weeks away — but many voters can’t wait for the whole thing to be over, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll out Friday.
Seventy percent of respondents can’t wait for the campaign to be over. Twenty percent for some reason can’t wait for it to start and just 4 percent are indifferent. The results are based on a December 6-7 poll.
Interestingly, voters on both sides of the aisle share a similar distaste for the 2012 contest: 67 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans can’t wait for the campaign to end.
But voters’ position on the campaign did depend on their age. No big surprise: the more of these things you’ve suffered through — I mean, witnessed — the less exciting they seem. Thirty-three percent of 18-to-29-year-olds can’t wait for the campaign to begin. Eighty percent of voters 65 years or older can’t wait for it to be over.
But the poll wasn’t all bad news for the candidates:
Importantly, despite their generally negative feelings toward the campaign, Americans are not necessarily going to tune it out completely, or decline to participate. The same poll finds that 57% of Americans have already given “quite a lot” of thought to the upcoming election, and 72% are at least somewhat enthusiastic about voting in next year’s election.
