No matter who wins the 2024 presidential race, one thing is clear: Political anxiety and division will remain high for the foreseeable future.
So just before Election Day, I spoke with Kevin Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska who studies the intersection of political attitudes, biology, and evolution. In 2019, he and colleagues published a study that found almost 40% of Americans reported experiencing stress over politics, 11.5% thought their physical health had been affected, and 4% reported suicidal thoughts.
“One of the things that at least shines through clearly in the data that we’ve collected is that politics is a constant chronic stressor,” he said. “It just doesn’t go away. … It’s not like the conflict ends or the divide ends” after Election Day.
We talked about political anxiety, tribalism, and how much our political attitudes might be driven by biology rather than environment. “Humans are a real pain in the rear, because they’re so hard to explain, and you think you’ve got something figured out, and then you try to replicate it, and it doesn’t work,” he said. “But I think the weight of the evidence … points towards the fact that there is something deeply, psychologically embedded in us that probably has biological roots that predisposes us to lean toward the either the left or the right.”
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