“Did Joe Biden drop out?”

by Richard Pooley

Photo: Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

At 6am Eastern Time in the USA on November 5 last year – election day – something strange started happening. Google’s search engine began to register this question: “Did Joe Biden drop out?”. It soon became the number one enquiry on Google, peaking at midnight Eastern Time, after the voting booths closed on the West Coast. The next morning, as the results began to show that Donald Trump had beaten Kamala Harris to the Presidency, the same question was number one on Google Search once again. Throughout the two days, the question was especially popular in cities and those swing states like North Carolina and Philadelphia which would decide the election.

So, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans had managed to tune out of the final 107 days of the cacophonous 2024 US presidential election coverage without realising that President Joe Biden had dropped out of the race on July 21. If that many people had bothered to ask Google if he was indeed no longer the Democrats' candidate, how many more were similarly ignorant of this fact? Perhaps many of the tens of millions who didn't bother to vote. Perhaps many of them didn't even know there was an election going on.

Like many arrogant, foreign liberals, I added this to my mental store of facts about US Americans and their political system which proved to my satisfaction that a vast number of the former are so politically ignorant that they don’t realise that the latter is broken beyond repair, and so stupid that they don’t care that it is.  I probably thought that few Brits, four months earlier during our general election, would have asked “Is Boris Johnson no longer Prime Minister?” I am not so sure any more.

As faithful readers will know, I spent much of the first half of last year trying to get the Liberal Democrat candidate for the UK constituency of Frome and East Somerset (FES), Anna Sabine, elected as MP for the said constituency. Anna won. Since then I have been doing my small bit to ensure that she holds on to her seat at the next election whenever that is. If Mr Farage, leader of Reform, is right (and when is he not?) that could be as early as 2027.  I have been knocking on doors and finding out what is annoying the voters of Frome (Green-tinged, arts-focused, with a proud record of effective local democracy), Midsomer Norton-Radstock (run-down, ex-coal mining, Brexit-voting), and the many ancient villages in between– some impoverished, huddled around vanished coal pits, some a prosperous mix of commuters and retirees.  

And over the past two months I have been trying to find out how many activists the Liberal Democrats actually have in the area. If an activist is defined as someone who will, at the very least, stuff a few envelopes with newsletters from the MP and our local councillors, then the answer is around 120. Of those, I have found 95 are guaranteed to deliver those stuffed envelopes but only about 15 would also be prepared to knock on doors, listen to concerns, and find out voting intentions (not, dear reader, to persuade people to vote for us – still something which even long-in-the-tooth canvassers don’t get). By the way, my definition of activist does not include being a party member. Many of those 120 are not Liberal Democrat members; some are even supporters of other parties at local elections, and some are simply friends and neighbours of the MP or a councillor. Plus, 'activist' may give you an image of a youthful person striding along the street or garden path and shoving leaflets through letter boxes at speed. If the average age of a Liberal Democrat member nationally is 62, which I am informed it is, then the average age of the 120 activists in FES must be closer to 70. We are few, old and not especially politically committed to our party and its policies.

So, what have I learned from listening to voters and party supporters? That people are not just leery of politicians and uninterested in politics - that has long been the case. It goes deeper than that: they are switching off from so much political discourse that many don't really know what is going on in the world. According to Ofcom last year, 11% of British adults say they get most of their news from TikTok, and 30% from Facebook. How reliable and factual is this 'news'?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the voters of FES don’t have opinions. They certainly do – on Immigration, Gaza, the National Health Service, Ukraine, the European Union, Trump, Farage, Starmer (if they can name him – plenty can’t). But as I listen to these opinions, even those I agree with, I realise so many are based on myths and fictions.

Take the issue which is dominating the political discourse in the UK this year (and many years past): immigration. Last month I stood at an open door with a colleague listening to a man, with his wife chirping agreement behind him, who had plenty of solutions to the “wave of immigrants flooding the country.” The only problem was that his facts were all wrong. He claimed, for example, that there were far more illegal migrants than legal ones. When told by my companion, a first-timer at canvassing, that only 4% of migrants last year had come across in “small boats” and that most of them were genuine asylum-seekers escaping persecution and worse, he told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. They were all coming because they would get free housing and “lots of benefits denied to British people.”

A few doors down we met someone who thought the fuss about immigration had been whipped up by populists like Nigel Farage to garner votes but that it was a worrying fact that "nearly half" of people in Britain were "from abroad". The real figure, according to the 2021/22 census is that 16% are foreign-born...including Boris Johnson. But most people we listened to that day just shook their heads and said things like "Politics? Not interested, mate." Several said something along the lines of "I don't listen to the news any more."

The level of understanding of what is going on in the world, let alone of the UK's political system, is so low that I am beginning to wonder whether we have a sufficiently educated populace to sustain our democracy.

Frome and East Somerset is a new constituency. Before last year's election the Frome end was in a constituency with a Liberal Democrat MP. The Midsomer Norton-Radstock part had as its MP the Conservative, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Eton-educated, right-wing "MP for the 18th Century". As a leading Brexiteer and vocal supporter of Boris Johnson he was constantly in the news. He was also a hard-working constituency MP, popular even among some of his many Labour and Liberal Democrat-voting constituents. I can attest that few could not name him as their MP.

So, when first campaigning for Anna Sabine in Midsomer Norton and Radstock, I made a point of telling those voters I met that, because of changes to the constituency boundaries, they could no longer vote for (or against) Jacob Rees-Mogg. Many were delighted, some were not. But all wanted to know why. I tried to explain the role of the Boundary Commission and how its duty was to make sure each constituency had roughly the same number of voters and that it would make sense to the people living in it - e.g. trying to keep within one boundary the places where you lived and shopped. It's an almost impossible task. I stressed that the commissioners were objective and not politicians. All this was news to everyone I spoke to. I could see that I was often not believed. This sounded like gerrymandering to many (not that they used that piece of political jargon).

I and my fellow canvassers, despite all our efforts, only spoke to a minority of voters in all the towns and villages where Rees-Mogg was no longer a candidate. Our election leaflets always made this fact clear. But how many voters read them? Moreover, any voter who drove just a few miles north or west would cross over into the constituency where Rees-Mogg was standing and see stakeboards and posters with his name on. How many of those voters, on the UK election day of July 4 last year, looked down at the ballot paper and wondered why Jacob Rees-Mogg was not on the list of candidates? Many, I now think.