A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll reported that 67 percent of Americans are anxious about the November election, showing a 7-point increase from four months ago.
When asked about what feelings come to mind when thinking about the 2024 presidential election, exhaustion, dread and optimism were among the top responses.
“The world feels increasingly unpredictable to many people — and unpredictability, the radically unknown, is one of the core bases for anxiety,” Kirk Schneider, a clinical psychologist, told Yahoo.
More than half of participants say they are worried about the election’s effect on the economy and the possibility of political violence. After President Biden dropped out of the race, 32 percent of people said they were less anxious.
Ten percent of respondents noted they have avoided all election news or news about an opposing candidate in hopes of coping with anxiety onset by the election cycle.
Medical experts are recommending social media users introduce “hope scrolling” while interacting with their daily feed to boost positive feelings about the state of politics.
“How do you feel when you’re looking at a piece of content, whether it’s something on TikTok or a reel,” Keneisha Sinclair-McBride, a clinical psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, said to Yahoo. “If it’s giving you that little boost where you feel hopeful or happy or amused, that’s positive. If you’re hoping to have more of a hope-scroll experience, then you’re going to want more of that content.”
Finding shared feelings about the election amid a community, whether virtual or in person, has been helping voters cope with the stressors of the presidential election. In the survey, 45 percent said spending time with family or friends with differing political views was in fact not stressful at all.
The survey collected responses from 1,755 U.S. adults from Sept. 11-13 with a margin of error of a 2.9 percentage points.