July 15, 2025, 3:25 p.m.
According to a Pew Research survey released last week, the vast majority of Americans think that it makes a big difference who the president is when it comes to how the U.S. is viewed in the world, the mood of the country, national security, and the health of the economy. That makes sense. What is a bit more surprising is that fewer than one-third of Americans think that who the president is makes a big difference in their personal life.
This is the rare public opinion metric that doesn’t have a partisan gap. Democrats have become slightly more likely to say it matters since President Trump took office, while Republicans remained steady.
This juxtaposition between little personal impact and massive national and global impact illustrates how many Americans live their lives disconnected from politics.
Looking around at the political discourse in the last couple of weeks, I get where people are coming from when they say the president doesn’t make a lot of difference in their personal lives. By some calculations, 60 percent of Americans can’t afford the basic costs of living, and what are some of the top news stories? The Epstein files may or may not exist. Elon Musk is maybe starting a third party. Former President Biden used an autopen for pardons.
These won’t affect most people’s daily lives unless they work in politics or media. In fairness, conversations are also happening about the big things that do affect people’s lives. But the flashier, more salacious stuff always rises to the top. If you don’t pay much attention to politics, that’s what you’re likely to see.
Of course, Epstein, Musk, and the autopen do matter politically. Jeffrey Epstein was a bad guy who likely committed a lot of crimes, and if political leaders were involved in his criminal activity we should know. But the main reason we’re even discussing it is that the online MAGA crowd has for years generated all sorts of theories about who is on some “list” they think exists, and they blamed the Biden administration for not releasing it.
Now—after Trump promised repeatedly to release the files—the official word from the Trump administration is that there is nothing to release. MAGA is angry, Democrats are pouncing on the division, and the media is all over it. It would be nice to know if there’s more to the story, but that knowledge isn’t going to magically lift millions of Americans out of poverty or clean up after disastrous floods.
Whether Elon Musk follows through with his threats to start a new party matters for the overall shape of politics but is also unlikely to materially affect most people’s lives. We’re in an era of high political polarization and dissatisfaction. Musk is just the latest of many to discover that he doesn’t like either party. He’s certainly not the first to suggest that the country needs more options.
There’s a key problem, though, and it’s that the U.S. political system is locked into a two-party structure by virtue of how we elect representatives: Only one person can win a district, so only two major parties are competitive. Additional candidates typically lack the committed voters, money, and infrastructure needed to win elections, to say nothing of a platform. Musk’s efforts are unlikely to break through without an issue set other than “I’m mad at everyone.”
Then there’s the autopen, which is a perfectly legal way for a president to sign pardons. Yet Republicans don’t like some of the pardons that Biden issued, and this is an opportunity to connect pardon decisions to questions about Biden’s mental acuity. It’s not exactly the top priority for voters right now, though—and Republicans should have lost their standing to complain about pardons when Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants.
All three of these controversies deserve some attention. But do we need more speculation about Epstein? How many think pieces do we need about how third parties aren’t usually successful? Do we need to litigate who used what kind of pen? I actually drafted a column on third parties and deleted it—there are plenty of takes out there already.
People don’t connect politics to their personal lives when politics seems sensationalized and focused on wealthy men in and around D.C. Sure, those are stories that get their attention—news is entertainment these days—but if the stories don’t directly affect their lives, of course they won’t think who the president is is a big deal for them personally. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem that pulls people further away from seeing their government help them with the price of eggs.
Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is a vice president at GQR Research.
