{"id":92,"date":"2016-11-10T00:56:34","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T00:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/?p=92"},"modified":"2016-11-10T00:59:26","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T00:59:26","slug":"election-numbers-showcase-decline-in-spite-of-the-candidates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/2016\/11\/10\/election-numbers-showcase-decline-in-spite-of-the-candidates\/","title":{"rendered":"Election Numbers Showcase Decline in Spite of the Candidates"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"votesmackdown\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Well the presidential election of 2016 has come and gone, and the nation seems more divided than ever. However, this not a statement to rile up the winners and losers this election, but rather to make clear, \u00a0that despite the controversy heading into the polls, more than half the nation has been tallied as “didn’t vote”. Now it is important to note that Mashable, who has the initial numbers may wrong in the actual totals, but what is painfully clear is that as it stands now 46.6% of Americans didn’t vote. \u00a0Their statistics are based on eligible voters in the US which is a staggering 231,556,622. This kind of information becomes massive media news, so its no wonder Mashable (among many others) would jump at the story, but one has to wonder if such stories aren’t a bit premature.\u00a0 The thing really sticks out here is how even the media hype about the candidates misdeeds and constant social media coverage could encourage from producing one the lowest turnout rates in the 20 years. It is a shame too, because journalists and the media couldn’t stop posturing about what would happen when either candidate were to win. Perhaps journalists did their jobs too well or maybe not well enough, with focus on things interview tapes and email scandals rather political issues, which turned this election into a sideshow. So in a way the media did its due diligence, but perhaps as a result of so attention on the candidates personal lives and private dealings, the political issues, aka the things the president takes care of in office got lost in the shuffle. Combine that with media over-saturation in terms of ads and the conditions the media created for the election might have been so unappealing that people refused to vote as a result. Covering politics during an election is important, but I think this election proved how easy it can be for the media to get sidetracked under certain conditions and leave the general public to piece together certain political agendas, which is something most people don’t want to do or at least they shouldn’t have to just because the information’s availability on the internet. In that sense, the media could be seen as partly responsible for the lack of voter turnout, although that in it of itself is little more than speculation at this point. It will be interesting to see how the media finishes out its coverage of this year’s election.<\/p>\n

Link to Mashable Article<\/a><\/p>\n

Image Owned\u00a0of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well the presidential election of 2016 has come and gone, and the nation seems more divided than ever. However, this not a statement to rile up the winners and losers this election, but rather to make clear, \u00a0that despite the controversy heading into the polls, more than half the nation has been tallied as “didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6070,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169158],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6070"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/96"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/j237jasonhowarth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}