Is There a Post-Election Burnout?

I am starting to suspect that the constant barrage of reports from all sides about the “stolen election” has begun to turn most of the general American audience off.

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The press conferences are drying up, the avenues for contesting the election are closing, and it’s been a month. The loud voices of the Very Online community are still talking about every little topic that crops up. I haven’t been able to avoid them all, but I’ve tried.

But I have noticed something lately at several conservative sites. The pieces that trend or are talked about most? They aren’t about the election itself, and many of them aren’t even tangentially about it. There are other things that conservative readers are starting to focus on instead. They aren’t drawn to the election stories like they were.

I briefly glanced over several of the top traffic posts from the last week here at RedState and, similarly, most of the top posts are, at best, related to, but not outright about, the election itself. It’s a data point worth observing, whether or not it holds up over the long run, but I think we’re trending into “Let it just be over soon” territory.

Which is not a bad thing, mind you.

We’re moving to the true post-election part of the news cycle, where it’s less about the election itself and more about what comes next. Stories about Biden’s cabinet picks are drawing all the discussion right now. People are pointing out the sycophancy of the media now that Trump is heading out and Biden is heading in. There are numerous pieces on the makeup of the House and Senate.

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But very little on the “stolen election” outside of Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Trump’s rantings on the subject.

It seems a lot of those pieces are now being relegated to further outside the mainstream and not picking up the traffic they once did, and I think most writers are recognizing this because they are writing fewer and fewer of these pieces. Ultimately, I think that ends up being good in the long run.

I still don’t see the path to overturning the election results, and I don’t see that the Trump team can overturn that many states in the time remaining. But Republicans and conservatives can start building up their own resistance to the Biden era 1) by supporting their candidates in Georgia and 2) preparing to find and endorse good local candidates to build a deep bench come the next election cycle.

The 2020 election cycle has gone on too long, and most people seem to be ready for a break from it. And the sooner they take that break, the sooner they’ll transition over to the next fight… and it’s one they’ll desperately need to be ready for.

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