Spring Break Revelers Are a Good Reminder: Americans Don't Vote on Foreign Policy
The percent of Americans who said in exit polls in 2024 that foreign policy was their top issue when choosing between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was less than 5%.
There’s a darling video making the rounds on social media of spring breakers being interviewed by Fox News about the current state of the world. The kids know nothing. Their biggest concerns are who to hook up with, how to stay drunk and tan, and how to “get with as many girls as we can and not come back with an STD.”
It’s completely adorable. They are gorgeous, friendly, and carefree in a way that feels uniquely American, but also like a throwback to a more innocent time, getting drunk and laid IRL, no dating apps necessary.
Even their total lack of interest in politics and foreign policy is refreshing.
“You must be happy—the Ayatollah is dead,” the interviewer says.
“I'm so—what? Who?”
“What? What is that?”
“Who the f*** is Ayotollah?”
“ I have never heard that word in my life.”
“Lewis, what’s Ayatollah?”
It’s a great reminder to the hyper-online caste that is America’s journalists that only 20% of Americans are on Twitter. Most Americans do not follow the news closely, if at all. And even those following the news are much less invested in foreign policy than domestic policy.
Exit polling from 2024 found that a measly 4% of Americans ranked foreign policy as the issue that mattered most to them in deciding how they voted for president. 4%! At the height of the Gaza war, with Israel/Palestine playing an outsized role in the discourse on the Left, with choices as disparate as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, less than 5% of Americans viewed foreign policy as their top issue in pulling the lever one way or the other. And of that 4% who did vote on foreign policy, the clear majority were Trump voters; it was just 3% for Harris voters. More important to all Americans was abortion, the economy, immigration, and the “state of democracy” (34% of Americans, 80% of them Democrats, said they voted on this).
Voters will tell pollsters in the lead up to an election that foreign policy is “very important” to how they are voting (though when forced to rank it, they still rank it last, as a Wall Street Journal survey found), but once in the voting booth, they vote on how they feel about the United States.
A 2023 article from the non-partisan Public Affairs Council noted that in the three elections preceding 2024, “foreign policy wasn’t even relevant enough for pollsters for the longest-standing exit poll to offer it as a choice for the question of which issue mattered most to voters.” The 2022 exit poll for The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and The AP had foreign policy tied with the pandemic for the eighth most important issue. Just 2% of voters said it was their top concern in choosing who to vote for. During the 2018 midterms, it came in seventh, as the top issue for 5% of voters. It was a big higher in 2016, at 13%, but the trend line seems pretty clear.
I know this is a hard pill to swallow for the rest of world, especially its elites, who spend a lot of time talking about the United States. I regret to inform them that it’s not mutual.
Revel on, Spring Breakers!
Ignorance is bliss, and ignorance will always be the domain of the young and foolish. But thankfully spring breakers hardly represent the average young American 🇺🇸
Sorry this is a bit long! I agree that the spring break video, with the constructed presentation (splicing of added music and video of political figures) is hilarious. It definitely made me laugh. And youth of course is the time of blooming, so this is a Spring break snapshot of America’s not only hilarious but also pathetic field of blooming youth. The time of blooming is usually the sweetest, though all too short, part of a whole life. These young adults are not so much living it up as throwing it away. Remember the song from Miranda's musical “Hamilton:" "I’m not giving up my shot!” Oh yes, these young adults very much are. And not just in their Spring Break—it takes many years of previous miseducation to become that ignorant and to acquire such poor judgement.
Is the idea, in labelling it “adorable," a clear overestimation that the American university “scholars" have so much “privilege” (as prosperous Americans, as well as mostly white—though striving to be browner!) that they can afford to throw a part of their blooming youth away?
Every single Indian I know in India, and every single Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese immigrant I know in the U.S., would find this video abhorrent (and not funny), and would hold it up as proof of their confirmation bias that American/Western/Judeo-Christian culture is deeply inferior to Indian Hindu and Chinese Buddhist and Vietnamese Buddhist cultures. They would (and on the whole very much do) conclude that, employers are right to have so little trust in hiring American college graduates, and would do better (after first hiring their own better brought up Asian-American college graduates) to just keep on importing and hiring students out of Asia, where the Indian and Chinese students are superior not only by being “of color,” (with no need to tan) but even more because they know better than to give up their chance (that short window of their youth and blooming). And so many Americans don’t know any better. Like the Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” but in this scenario it is the American college students drinking and “getting with” the opposite sex, while the international (Chinese and Indian) college students work hard and build up for their own solid futures.
As an educator and a mother, I would be horrified if my students or my own young adult children behaved like the college students in the video. If the video would only be “adorable" as long as it wasn’t my own kids or my own students behaving like that, then I would be a hypocrite to label it “adorable.” The video is hilarious as a meme, but pathetic as the real truth that it is about modern American culture.