Not only are Barack Obama and Mitt Romney glad that Nov. 6 has finally arrived, so are all of us voters.
Folks in the swing states are finally done with incessant television commercials for the presidential candidates. The rest of us are done with the overload from more local candidates and ballot issues.
All of us will be glad to see and hear more nonpolitical stories in our newspapers, online and on our TVs and our radios.
And we definitely will be thrilled to see all the negativity start to fade as we get back to our normal lives.
True, negative campaigning has been around for, well, for as long as people have sought political office; check out these old presidential TV ads if you need proof. But this year was worse.
We had all the Super PAC ads. And social media has come into its election effect own.
And we had social media.
Although it’s still a secret ballot, most of us now know what positions and candidates our friends, families, coworkers and acquaintances support thanks to their Twitter and Facebook comments.
And more often than not, however, we quickly found out a person’s political persuasion not because of their cheering for their causes and candidates, but because of their slamming of the other side.
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed the general tone of thousands of news stories and millions of public tweets and wall posts. The study found that while mainstream media has been more balanced in its coverage, the pre-election discussion of the presidential candidates on Facebook and Twitter has been overwhelmingly negative.
Statista, the Hamburg, Germany-based statistical data collection portal, put the Pew data into the graphs below illustrating social media’s political negativity.
Click image for a larger view.
Find more election statistics at Statista.
Will the negativity stop once the ballots are cast and counted?
Have you ever seen Fox News or MSNBC?
I fear — OK, I know — that regardless of who wins, the negative vibes will continue, both among the electorate and on Capitol Hill.
The best we can hope for given the issues that face the United States — starting yesterday with the impending financial crisis, and yeah, I’m calling it a fiscal cliff — is that it’s a short term venting of frustration and anger.
We don’t have time for anything more.
So get your whining and moaning and online blasting of the other party out of your system. We’ve got work to do, and that includes making sure that members of Congress and the president do their jobs, too.
You also might find these items of interest:
- Voters get their say Nov. 6 on 30 tax-related
state ballot initiatives - What happens if the electoral vote is tied?
- Making Obama, Romney tax plans add up
