Funding for “To the Contrary,” provided by: This week, on “To the Contrary”: We're human.

We are wired for survival.

And so when we feel that our rights or our voices are being threatened or unheard, that's uniquely traumatizing.

We really need to think about streamlining that primary process, making that time for primary and general election shorter, and also really looking at the funding model that we use for elections.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to “To the Contrary,” a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Election fatigue.

It's a phrase many of us have now learned and unfortunately, experienced.

By election fatigue I'm referring to those who feel they've been on an emotional roller coaster, cycling nonstop through anxiety, fear, and sometimes depression while consuming what they feel is a cultural and media overload of election information.

It's so abounds it's been given a name: election stress disorder.

Almost 60% of Americans told the Pew Research Center last month they feel election fatigue, and only 40% told researchers they found it easy or somewhat easy to find reliable election information.

With me to discuss election fatigue are two experts Dr. Lucy McBride, a primary care doctor and podcast host, and Niambi Carter, associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and author of the award- winning text “American While Black: African Americans Immigration and the Limits of Citizenship.” Both of you, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you both for being here.

Let's start with each of you defining election fatigue for me.

Please start with you, Dr. McBride.

What I'm seeing in my office with my own patients is physical, emotional fatigue from being in a state of vigilance.

These election cycles are so long, they almost start the day after an inauguration.

And the amount of information that we are consuming and the diet we're being fed of fear and outrage is exhausting.

I don't think we're meant as humans to ingest this much information thats this triggering of heightened emotions.

But don't we as humans have control over how much of that we pay attention to?

Absolutely.

We can turn the TV off.

We can change the channel.

We can go for a walk.

We can snuggle with our pets.

We can engage in psychotherapy, but particularly in the moment we're in right now, it's hard to ignore, if you breathe air, the energy.

And I live in Washington, D.C., where, you know, national news is our local news.

But what we're, what I'm seeing in my patients is the physical manifestations of being in a constant state of high alert and a feeling of vulnerability and uncertainty, regardless of your politics.

Does it stretch as far as like sleeplessness?

Has it cause sleeplessness in people who are affected by it?

Absolutely.

I'm seeing patients who are not sleeping well.

They're gravitating to comfort foods, to alcohol.

People who are in programs for sobriety are having a more difficult time.

Patients who are anxious are more anxious.

Patients who have been depressed are more depressed.

People who have experienced trauma, discrimination are feeling much more on edge.

Blood pressures are higher.

It's physical.

It's emotional, and it's behavioral.

It's affecting people through and through.

Professor Carter, how do people of color experience it differently?

The experience of voting is always heightened for everyone.

But I would say when we talk about communities of color, it's important to sort of disaggregate who we're talking about.

So in general, we find that for Latino voters, for example, there is some suggestion that they experience more of this exhaustion, in part because of the whole process of voting.

We know that certainly for Black voters, it's similar but different.

So there might not be the same concerns around whether you are a person who should be voting or not.

But there's certainly a sense that because you are excluded from the electoral process or there are attempts, as we saw in like Georgia and other places that put forward more restrictive voting measures, that you are not wanted in that process.

There's also, I would say, probably across groups, you know, more frustration around promises made but not kept.

And that keeps people either away from the process, afraid of the process, just apathetic about the process.

So it definitely manifests differently in minoritized communities.

And so if each of you could tell me how that affects treatment and possible treatments available, I would like to hear that.

Well, from a medical standpoint, when I'm talking to a patient who, for example, is coming in feeling anxious, on edge, sleepless, and, you know, any other manifestation of feeling vulnerable, out of control, or the absence of agency, the first thing to do is to normalize those feelings.

I mean, we're human, we are wired for survival.

And so when we feel that our rights or our voices are being threatened or unheard, that's uniquely traumatizing.

So it's important to normalize those feelings.

I do that with my patients.

I do that with my own kids.

I do that with myself, to give ourselves permission to have feelings during a charged moment in time.

The second thing is to help people become aware of the relationship between the way they feel and the way they show up in their relationships, the way they relate to food or alcohol, the way they present themselves, the way they cut people off in traffic or not, you know.

Yeah.

Road rage.

That's another thing I heard, read somewhere that road rage is way up.

It's up, it's up.

So unsurprisingly, you know, people act out.

So it's important to help people improve their own self awareness about the way that they are affecting themselves negatively and the way they may be affecting relationships, which only does harm.

And then to troubleshoot to the extent that's possible, the issues, to talk to patients, for example, about how to optimize their sleep, to help them think about realistic, sustainable ways to get regular movement in their life, to think about what added supports they need to not just say, “Oh, it's normal, you're going to be okay,” but rather to arm them with tools and information to help them mentally and physically.

Maybe that's suggesting, you know, re-upping with AA, maybe that's suggesting, you know, taking a day off work to get rest and see your doctor.

Maybe that means, you know, getting a therapist or having an honest conversation with someone in your life who's particularly aggravating.

Maybe it's just being safe and not cutting people off in traffic.

In other words, it starts with permission to be human.

Self awareness is next and then tools to manage the inevitable feelings that people will have during this kind of a time.

Professor Carter, when I think about what you talked about, the efforts to restrict voting rights, were African Americans who lived through the Jim Crow era and, you know, the South denying, southern states denying voting rights to people left and right.

Do they have a particular reaction to the situation, and how does it differ from young people who never experience that?

Some would think it would be demobilizing to those people.

My mom is one of those people.

My dad, they lived through the Jim Crow period, as did my grandparents.

But it actually has the opposite effect.

We see older African Americans showing up in droves to participate in the electoral process.

With younger people, I think the way that they have been socialized is very different.

So while I had parents and grandparents that lived through Jim Crow, these are young people who their first president may have been Barack Obama or they don't really have any connection to that struggle for voting rights.

They don't have parents who didn't get the right to vote until they were 18, like me.

My grandparents were grown adults by the time they got the right to vote.

And so they have a very different understanding.

So whereas you see older, Black people expressing like, “This is a fundamental right, this is something we fought for.

This is something people died for.

This is our obligation.” You have young people saying, “Well, why should we engage in a system that is rigged?

Why should we participate in the system that does not deliver any real change?

Why should I participate in a system where I find myself more likely to lose than not?” You see this in places like Georgia, like North Carolina, even in Florida, right.

Where, or Texas, where you have large numbers of minority voters, but you still have, say, bright red states.

And it doesn't mean that every minority voter is a Democrat.

I'm not suggesting that.

But when you think about the policies around race and equity that have really been on the ballot, when you think about access to reproductive freedoms, right, which are really consequential for women of color, that have been on the ballot, it can make people withdraw from the process, particularly younger people.

So I think, you know, when you think generationally, as well as racially, it can actually, show up in some really important ways.

In the election that just ended, why did, in Georgia, which you mentioned, why did Kamala Harris not do as well as, say, Stacey Abrams did with African American voters?

The time period was very different.

Right.

Stacey Abrams run predates.

She is a daughter of Georgia.

Right.

So her get out the vote effort was very strong in that state.

The voting laws were different when Stacey Abrams ran, as opposed to when Kamala Harris ran.

There was also some interference.

How were they?

Tell me and the audience, how were they different.

The more restrictive voting legislation that was put in under Kemp, which made it more, raised, the bar for registration that some people felt was specifically to disenfranchise Black voters.

There was also, I believe, a decrease in the early voting period and some changes to voting places so that people, particularly in urban, in heavily Black areas would have to take more time to actually vote.

All of those are efforts to suppress the vote, right?

To exhaust people, to tire people out, to make people go home, frustrate people, even to have a cooling effect.

Right?

To make people afraid to try to register because they are afraid that it could be a felony if they misreport some information on their, on their voting application.

So it was a lot happening.

I also think, you know, Georgia is and has been, I think, undergoing some real demographic shifts.

I mean, we saw a few years ago when Keisha Lance Bottoms was running for mayor of Atlanta, she had a real challenge, and that was a heavily Black city with lots of Black mayors who predated her and hadn't had that level of challenge.

So I think, Georgia is changing.

I also think we cannot forget that in some parts of this country, Kamala Harris is still considered foreign and different.

And I don't mean that because of her parentage.

I mean because she is from California.

She is not a Southerner.

She has no sort of ties to the South in that way.

And I think for some people, they didn't read her as perhaps the same kind of Black, if you will.

And I know that sounds strange to some, but I also think it's clear that Black women adhered to her coalition, to the Democratic Coalition, where we saw some shifts.

As I recall, 85% of African American women voted for her.

Right.

And in the most, the most shift you saw was in Black men.

But I think it's important to say that we also saw white women who were considered moderates turning away from that Democratic coalition that got Joe Biden elected in just 2020.

So I don't think it's because of African American voters in the state of Georgia that Kamala Harris did not win that state.

I think it has more to do with the white voters in that state, who are the majority of the voting populace in Georgia as they are in, you know, Tennessee and other places.

But I think Georgia is, I think, a really interesting case.

And really, I would say Georgia has gotten as far as they have with minority voters because of the new voter project that Stacey Abrams helped put together and really increasing outreach.

Because one thing we do know is that people don't show up to polls if they're not mobilized.

And we ask people to show up a lot in our country, to vote.

And that also leads to this fatigue.

Would like it if each of you could comment on resilience training.

It's used in the military.

What is it and how could it help people deal with election fatigue?

So resilience training is akin to what I try to teach my kids, not through military techniques or tactics at all, but it's about kind of expanding and broadening your kit of coping tools and not only having the skills and tools to manage adversity and hardship, but also to lean into and breathe in the knowledge that we do get through hard things.

To affirm ourselves ability to be resilient.

In other words, if you think about what we've been through collectively as a country, if you look at the pandemic, for example, I mean, that was two, three years of sustained adrenaline and cortisol coursing through our veins.

During that time, we had George Floyd's murder.

A lot of loneliness because people had to shelter at home.

Yes, loneliness epidemic.

You know, people unable to witness and be with their loved ones at the end of their life.

The normal landmarks of our, you know, family and community rituals were taken away.

Schools, you know, kids were out of school for so long.

The horrors that we went through as a community, collectively, are not subtle.

Of course, everyone's pandemic experience differed.

And some people suffered more than others.

Some people even thrived during the pandemic.

I don't know who that really was, but but anyway.

But what I'm saying is that if we can look back, for example, at those three years and recognize that we're still here, we survived.

We can do hard things.

We don't want to do hard things.

We don't want to choose to have to go through something like that.

But when we recognize that we are resilient and we have the tools that can help us get through the next crisis that inevitably will come our way.

I mean, as I say to patients all the time, you know, my job isnt to help you be happy all the time or, you know, have perfect cholesterol and perfect blood pressure and a perfect body weight.

It's to give you the tools and education you need to make healthy choices for yourself, to be able to weather the inevitable storms that come your way.

And that's really the nature of resilience training.

It's basically life and recognizing how hard it is and how well we do when we maintain hope and a positive attitude.

I think because I'm dealing with young people, many of whom this is their first engagement with the political system, and they are feeling a variety of things still.

Right.

But what I tell them is this is not something we haven't seen before.

There is the possibility to come out on the other side.

And as a political scientist, I know this, and I hope they learn this, that losing is a part of the process, its baked in.

We don't always get what we want, and that's okay too.

That there is value sometimes in learning how to concede, that there is still lessons to be learned.

I think many times we so focus on the winning and the winners, that we don't tell people how to lose.

We don't tell people how to lose without being a loser.

Right?

That there's a way that you can yield yourself to the process.

Right?

Like we have to acknowledge and we have to give in.

This is the process we have.

But we don't have to give up.

If we don't like the outcome, then we always have another opportunity to try again.

And it may not look the same and it may not feel good while you're doing it.

But I don't think any things that they are thinking about, any of the changes that they want are possible without hard work.

You're going to stumble and you're going to fall.

You can try your hardest sometimes and still don't get what you want.

Like I tell them all the time, I could go out for the Olympic trials today.

I'm not going to make it.

I'm not fast enough.

But it doesn't mean that you don't try.

You just know sometimes it's going to be an uphill battle, and sometimes you may not get it at all.

But you're not always doing it just for you.

And nobody goes through life winning in everything.

Nobody.

Absolutely not.

You fail more times than you win in many cases.

But you learn something each time, and I hope that they understand that, that there is value in that too.

We don't talk about it much, but I think it's the only way you know how to win is if you know how to lose sometimes.

You know, we talk a lot about mental health.

Luckily, in the era we live in, and I think young people are particularly attuned to mental health which is a wonderful thing.

I think you know mental health is finally having a moment and people are more aware of its relevance to our whole health.

I would say to you what I say to my patients, which is that, you know, mental health is part of the human condition.

It is inseparable from physical health.

Mental health, however, does not mean being right all the time.

It does not mean winning all the time.

It doesn't mean even being happy all the time.

It certainly doesn't mean being carefree and unburdened all the time.

Mental health is a process.

It's a process of self-discovery, a process of self-awareness.

And it's a process of understanding where you have agency and where you have agency is not always in the places that you think you have agency.

Give me an example, please.

Let's take, for example, I mean, this is like every day I talk with people about this stuff even though I'm a primary care doctor.

To me this is part of primary care.

So take someone who has diabetes and they feel they have given up on getting better with their diabetes.

When they understand the relationship between the cadence of their eating, not just what they're eating and the relationship between their stress and their childhood relationship with food and how they eat now, and they're given permission to say, “Hey, I have feelings about my body or food that relate to how I eat.” And that is as important as the insulin dose or the metformin dose, then they feel a sense of agency.

They don't feel like they're just victims of, you know, medications and lab tests.

They are empowered to understand that their emotions have everything to do with the way they eat and feel and the way their labs look.

That's empowering, that's agency.

But if I were to, as a doctor to say, “Wou know what, you gained weight, your blood sugars up this year, let's just ratchet up the drugs.” That's disempowering.

That's what leads to apathy, and that's what is, you know, unfortunately, happening to, for example, some people who feel like they have no agency in the electoral process that they feel like, “Okay, why why even try?” But the point is, whether it's with health or with voting or making a change in the world or with yourself, it's important to understand mental health and the process of democracy as a process.

You know, I don't think I've ever sort of come out to say that like health and democracy are the same thing, but I'm just saying they're all processes and they're not pretty, and they're just that, processes.

And it's how we learn and it's how we engage with change, and it's how we, how honest are we willing to be about ourselves and where we have agency?

And on the flip side, what we have to accept because there's a lot we have to accept, we cannot control.

Well, one thing we might be able to control, although I'm not sure, and other countries have laws about this, but what about a law cutting the length of the election process to 3 or 6 months?

That could be useful.

I mean, I think we saw with Kamala Harris was able to put together with about three months to go.

And I think that is inspiring, especially when we consider that, you know, Donald Trump has been running for two years, and at the time that he withdrew from the race, Joe Biden had been running for almost a year and a half.

So these are very, very long periods of time.

I think it can work, but other things have to happen too.

One, we also have to put in some fundraising limits because a lot of those places with shorter election cycles also make a public funding of the campaign mandatory.

And I think that's important because part of the reason the campaign cycle is so long is because it takes huge sums of money to run not just presidential campaigns, but congressional elections are becoming more expensive.

I mean, it was like $1 billion that Kamala Harris raised in this amount of time.

Part of the reason that window was so long is because you need to run in a primary and a general and because states are trying to get more attention.

So they want their primaries earlier and earlier.

These candidates have to announce earlier so they can put together infrastructure, you know, to run in the primaries and Iowa and Nebraska and all of these places.

So it actually is sort of baked into the process.

So I think if we want to have a better outcome, we really need to think about streamlining that primary process.

Making that time for primary, the general election shorter.

And also really looking at the funding model that we use for elections because while candidates can take advantage of a public funding option, they're going to be at a disadvantage because they're going to have significantly less money.

And we've seen, you know, all candidates recent candidates decline the public funding option because they can just raise so much money privately.

So I think a few things have to happen.

I don't think it would be a bad idea.

Probably be better for all of our mental health if we did have a shorter election cycle.

But I don't know what the will is going to be, and that's going to be not just from the candidates themselves, but also the political parties because they have a lot to do with how elections run.

They are in charge of running primaries, for example.

Candidates will have to run differently.

Right?

So you can, when you pay taxes, right?

They like, “Do you want to donate to this fund?” Yeah.

I think it would stop being opt in, but it doesn't have to be a huge amount of money.

But that does mean how we do campaigns would have to change tremendously.

Right?

That might mean, you know, the private planes might have to go.

That might mean fewer stops.

That might mean, you know, fewer boots on the ground, no more consultants or fewer consultants.

Right.

Because the consultant class is making a lot of money here.

The types of advertisements people are investing in, it would change the nature of the way people run right now.

Well, thank you both for this.

Very enlightening on.

both of your parts.

Thank you.

Dr. Lucy McBride and Niambi Carter, associate professor at the University of Maryland.

That's it for this edition of “To the Contrary.” Keep the conversation going on our social media platforms.

Reach out to us @tothecontrary and visit our website, the address on the screen and whether you agree or think to the contrary, see you next time.

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