The US presidential election is coming, and don’t we know all about it. It is politics elevated to the level of spectacle. Even from across the ocean we hear about rallies with thousands of people, celebrity endorsements, balloons, flags and T-shirts. There are memes and moments and merchandise, obscene sums of money donated, tracked and spent. There is rolling reporting of polling, tracking the candidates’ ups and downs. Among the things they track is enthusiasm, and polls say that it is up.
Enthusiasm is not a word many people who have been involved in Irish elections would use to describe their experience. It is hard to imagine any Irish political figure smiling through the indignity of a balloon drop, or commanding the kind of unironic adoration seen in the Obama “Hope” poster or Trump flags. Which of our political leaders could pull off having a “brat summer” – a trend started by singer Charli XCX, whose tweet declaring “kamala IS brat” fuelled a viral sensation?
Our political events tend to be more parish hall than sold-out stadium. But with politicians gearing up for an autumn of dark evening canvassing, and voter turnout continuing to drop, should we be looking for more of this American-style enthusiasm in Irish politics?
A big part of what is meant by enthusiasm in the US is, of course, money. The replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris led to an increase in polling data on enthusiasm for Democrats, but it also led to a massive spike in donations to the campaign.
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The US supreme court decided in 1975 that political campaign expenditure counted as protected free speech. Money, quite literally, talks, and when it starts shouting this gets interpreted as excitement. The new candidate has secured over half a billion dollars in funding since she announced her candidacy on July 21st. Some $82 million of this was raised during the four days of the recent Democratic National Convention, the Democrat’s ardfheis. These figures are taken as confirmation that the base, at least, is fired up. Though it goes both ways. How much of the convention was about building voter enthusiasm, and how much of it was about getting the faithful to open their wallets?
Money is generally not a proxy for enthusiasm in Irish elections. As we gear up to an election we will not hear reports of how much money Fianna Fáil has raised, nor are we likely to be bombarded with daily texts and emails from campaigns selling us caps, Bibles, and a million promises. Donation and expenditure limits, a ban on TV advertising and other parts of our political culture have led to a scepticism of overly-funded campaigns, and a general discomfort at the role of money in politics.
One exception to this was the 2018 Together for Yes crowd-funder which aimed to raise €50,000 but raised 10 times that. A case study of the effort gives insight into this rare moment of public enthusiasm manifest as cash donations.
The fundraising focused on the opposition to the vote, saying that “anti-reform forces are ramping up”. It also explicitly connected donating to “supporters’ values and identities”, allowing them to share messages. The copy read; “you know – money talks”. Popular culture figures joined in the political process, with creative communities, musicians, actors, business leaders and meme-makers playing a central role. It is the only time that I have seen widespread adoption of political merchandise walking through the streets of Dublin, from T-shirt, to jumpers, to badges.
What is striking about the enthusiasm for these campaigns is that they were not about individual people or parties. They were about ideas, and a binary choice, with a defined singular opposition.
In contrast, as anyone looking at the sea of faces on lamp-posts would observe, our elections tend to be very person-centric.
The electorate’s unwillingness to emotionally invest in a political figure is no bad thing. It is worth remembering that historically enthusiasm was a pejorative term for a kind of religious fanaticism. And there is something discomfitingly messianic about the US election – such as Donald Trump embracing the language of those followers who treat him as divine. Michelle Obama had to remind her party that “Kamala and Tim...they are still only human. They are not perfect.” It is hard to imagine ever having to tell an Irish voter, or even engaged party member, that a political leader is “not perfect”.
And of course our elections are not binary choices. The Harris-Walz campaign is as much about vanquishing a bogeyman as it is anything else, in what Fintan O’Toole described as the monomania of the “one, holy and apostolic mission: beating Trump”.
Here the challenges we need our elected representatives to deal with in the next Dáil – the housing crisis, the climate crisis, the threat of political violence – do not have singular bogeymen. But as parties head out to knock on doors in the coming months those who want humane and equitable solutions to these crises should not be distracted by the tyranny of small differences and the personalisation of the choice facing voters. A unified vision, and an idea people can get behind, would get us a lot further.
Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at TheBriefing.ie
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