By Doug Livingston
Beacon Journal staff writer
For an hour and a half Monday night, Ohio residents will turn on their TVs, take to Twitter and tune their attention to the first presidential debate.
The premier event pits Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton side by side for the first time after months of name-calling and character assassinations hurled remotely from the campaign trail.
Many will watch. The debate is expected to shatter ratings.
And many will look away.
“This is going to be interesting,” said Wayne Beshara, a resident of Akron’s Highland Square neighborhood who is firmly against Trump but not finding it easy to support Clinton.
He, and other Akron-area locals, would like to hear two things: the truth and anything positive. “Each one is so negative,” said Beshara, 62. “I’m sure they’re going to be attacking each other. That’s all I’ve heard from them so far.”
With an American electorate reaching peak polarization, the antagonistic presidential campaign has calcified voter disapproval with politics.
“It’s gotten so bad,” said Noor Mahmood, a self-described “socially conscious” 20-year-old waitress saving up cash to resume her political studies at the University of Akron. “I feel like I’m watching a reality TV show.”
Jaded, the young moderate voter says “the candidates are just so full of s---.” She’ll tune in Monday night but only for entertainment. She and her friends, she said, expect nothing of value in “the stupid things they’ll say.”
“I’d like to see truth — especially from the Republican,” said Joyce Melton, 70, of West Akron. Melton said she’ll definitely watch the first half of the debate but figures she’ll shut it off after getting her fill of exaggerations, half-truths, loosely spun conspiracy theories and out-and-out lies.
The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which runs the debates, announced a week ago that the 90-minute moderated showdown Monday at Hofstra University will cover, in no particular order, three broad areas: “America’s Direction, Achieving Prosperity [and] Securing America.”
What exactly that means is anyone’s guess.
What’s certain, though, is that Americans have not been happy about the direction of their country, whether culturally, economically or — especially — politically.
More than 3 in 5 Ohioans, for a variety of reasons, believe the country is off-track, according to two University of Akron polls conducted this year by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.
The angst is a bit stronger in the Akron-Canton area, the surveys found. The local polling sample, as is the case across bellwether Ohio, was made up primarily of independent voters with near-even splits between Democrats and Republicans.
In the Akron-Canton area and Ohio, liberals were far less likely to say the country is off track, especially after eight years of a Democrat in the White House. Younger generations also had a rosier outlook.
Those who disapproved of the direction of the country, mainly conservatives and moderates, disproportionately cited problems related to morality and religion, politics, terrorism and immigration — all hot topics Trump has pounced on.
Record high disgust in American politics, which transcends gender, income and education, explains some of the disapproval in the direction of the country. And the two candidates, burdened by scandals, abysmal approval ratings and negative coverage from the media, have done little to persuade voters that government will start working, as it should, after either is elected.
With more than half of decided voters saying they’ll be voting not to support a candidate but to block the other, there’s concern that neither candidate will have the mandate to heal a divided nation.
The debate could offer that moment to make a case for a better path forward. Many, however, are expecting more of the rancorous rhetoric that has defined the campaign so far.
“You really don’t know who to vote for this year,” said Barb Yoder, a 50-something from Columbiana County.
She said she’s trying to like Clinton and months ago stopped talking politics with her husband, “an angry, white, man” who works long hours in a factory and is supporting Trump.
Trump doesn’t give “straight answers,” Yoder said. And Clinton is so calculated.
Truth, Yoder and other voters said, is in high demand and short supply.
Achieving prosperity, a second topic in the first debate, may be of the most significance to the Akron-Canton audience, which more frequently than the average Ohioan named jobs and poverty as a top concern.
The UA poll found that poverty or inequality registered with 1 percent of Ohio and 8 percent in the Akron-Canton area. Local folks also cited jobs 15 percent of the time versus 9 percent statewide.
The candidates have distinct proposals for improving the economy, which in the past eight years has made greater gains in employment than wages.
Clinton says she intends to put the country to work with a $275 billion pending plan to update aging infrastructure while shifting consumers off of fossil fuels and creating millions of “good-paying” green energy jobs. Trump says he offers deregulation, an impenetrable southern border (paid for by Mexico), putting America first in international trade and cutting trillions of dollars in taxes over the next decade.
The final debate topic, Securing America, presumably deals with immigration, trade, national security and foreign policy — issues that mean less to local voters than political dysfunction, public order (think crime and race) or public policy (government spending, debt, health care, taxes, education, welfare and other issues).
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.