When Bryan Jarrell, an Evangelical pastor in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, came across an election-themed episode of a podcast, he’d skip right over it. He would mute the TV when political ads came on, tried to teach his social-media feeds that he wasn’t interested in politics, and would throw campaign mailers straight in the trash. He’d skim news headlines sometimes, but if he could tell that the story was about national politics, he’d keep scrolling.

Today, exactly one week before the election, he will begin researching both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and make a decision about whom to support. He’s not sure where he’ll land—he is conservative on some social issues, but he doesn’t like Trump’s character.

Jarrell represents a set of Americans who, out of anxiety, exhaustion, or discouragement, are mostly tuning out campaign coverage yet will ultimately participate in the election. They’re political ostriches who, at the last minute, will take their head out of the sand. “For a decade now, people have started talking about news fatigue,” Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst, told me. “People are tired of being bombarded with the news. And then it kind of matured into news avoidance.” This tendency escalated with the increasing ubiquity of both online news and Donald Trump, Doctor said.

[Derek Thompson: Click here if you want to be sad]

Jarrell started purposefully ignoring campaign coverage after he noticed that his parishioners would come to him in the lead-up to elections and describe genuine fear about one candidate or the other taking the White House. He decided to recommend this strategy, of abstaining from the news until the final week of the race, to his parishioners, and to follow it himself.

“How much energy did America collectively spend imagining a Biden-Trump election only in July to have Biden drop out?” Jarrell said to me. “If you wait ’til the last week, that’s still enough time to make an informed decision, but you haven’t wasted all that emotional energy stressing about something that may not even come to pass.”

A sizable percentage of Americans seems to feel similarly. A 2022 Reuters Institute report found that 42 percent of Americans “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” up from 38 percent in 2017. The most common reasons people gave for avoiding the news were that it focused too much on politics and COVID, that it was biased, or that it made them feel unhappy or fatigued. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of Americans were already worn out by coverage of campaigns and candidates. A May poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 49 percent of those surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I’m tired of receiving and processing news about the 2024 presidential election.” Not caring about politics is a hallmark of what political scientists call “low information” citizens, but unlike many in the low-information camp, political ostriches do intend to vote. They just don’t feel the need to follow the news in order to do so.

The reason ostriches and others avoid political news is simple: “It’s all negative; it’s divisive; I’m sick of it,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me, relaying the views she hears in focus groups.

In Jacksonville, Florida, 31-year-old Tawna Barker didn’t watch the debates, and on social media, she scrolls past political news, skipping what she feels are “inflammatory, heavily one-sided articles.” She plans to vote for a third-party candidate. “Neither [Trump nor Harris] really seems like they’re actually going to do anything to help us,” she told me.

Barker, who in 2016 supported Bernie Sanders, seemed disappointed by the fact that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee that year. “Whoever’s running stuff behind the scenes is just gonna pick who they want to pick, and we just have to go along with it,” she said.

Cheryl Wilson Obermiller, a 66-year-old near Kansas City, Missouri, told me that she and her husband have swapped watching the news for taking walks or watching, say, Masterpiece Theater. She finds the news inflammatory, addictive, and occasionally insulting to people like her—she’s voting for Trump. She asks herself, “Am I wasting time watching politics when I could be helping my neighbor? And I think that’s something we all have to consider. Am I watching politics that are feeding in me an attitude that would make me look down on or dislike people?”

Obermiller still spends about an hour a day either reading or watching the news, down from about four to six hours several years ago. She gets the news that she does consume through Facebook groups and from Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld, “because I think he’s funny, even though a lot of times he says things that I kind of laugh about but I think are kind of mean,” she said.

[James Fallows: The media learned nothing from 2016]

Ignoring political news has become easier in recent years. Nearly half of Americans don’t subscribe to any news sources. Those seeking to dodge campaign coverage can choose to spend their time on apolitical TikToks and Instagram reels, and watch Netflix instead of CNN. “For people who are not interested in politics, which is most people, it’s actually easier than ever to not watch news shows, to not have the algorithm in your social-media feeds give you political information,” David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, told me.

Broockman found in a recent study that just 15 percent of Americans watch at least eight hours of “partisan” TV, such as Fox or MSNBC, each month. “However little you think voters care about politics, you will still always overestimate how much they care,” Broockman said. This helps explain why both Trump and Harris are appearing on podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy—they’re trying to get around people’s “I hate politics” filters.

If people are tuning out, it might not matter much for the election results. Most people already know whom they’re going to vote for; the universe of truly undecided voters is very small—likely less than 15 percent of the electorate. “The vast, vast, vast majority of voters settle into who they’re voting for, for whatever reasons they are, and then that’s kind of that, and there’s no information that they can get that is going to bump them off,” Dan Judy, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, told me. “There’s really a small number in most political campaigns of voters who are truly persuadable.” The willfully tuned-out will likely end up voting for whichever party they’ve always supported, but they will have suffered less agita in the process.

Jarrell, the pastor, feels that his approach to the news has made him more serene, and has given him more time to focus on his church and his family. “I believe that there’s a loving God in control of the universe,” he said, “and no matter who’s in the Oval Office, God’s still in heaven. And things are going to be okay.” That’s a hope he shares, surely, with Americans of all political persuasions.

The election is rigged. Democrats are already working to steal the election from Donald Trump, and the results are going to be illegitimate. That is, unless Trump wins. This is the message that has been percolating through segments of the online right. Over the past several weeks, conservative figures ranging from the fringe to the mainstream have been priming their audiences to declare fraud should the election not go their way. “The Democrats are rigging the 2024 election just like they did in 2020,” Laura Loomer, a right-wing troll and Trump ally, posted on the messaging app Telegram earlier this month. “From illegal voter registrations in Arizona, to widespread mail-in ballot fraud and encouraging democrats to flood the polls with illegal alien voters, they’re setting the stage to steal key swing states.”

Democrats “will be stealing Wisconsin and Michigan,” Owen Shroyer, the far-right host of the Infowars show, War Room, said on air last week. “I’d say that’s all but guaranteed at this point.” He then moved on to question why results might not be available on election night as they were in years prior to the rise of mail-in ballots (which take more time to count and process), a common right-wing line intended to further call the election’s integrity into question. The idea is that it’s supposedly fishy that votes now take longer to count, as though election fraud is something that cannot be done rapidly, but must be carefully aged like a delicate French cheese.

Even by the standards of the fringier segments of the right, Loomer and Shroyer are known for saying outrageous and polemic things. Still, more mainstream figures are also trying to more gently push the idea that election-security flaws may exist that could jeopardize the results. Fox News’s Jesse Watters accused Democrats of “trying to make elections less secure” on a segment during his show earlier this month. On Infowars, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that voting machines were changing voters’ intended ballot choices in a reliably red, mostly rural county in Georgia. “I will be working to investigate this issue and ensure the integrity of our elections in Georgia,“ she later posted.

The claims fall into several rough categories that range from soft attempts to undermine the credibility of the election to outright conspiracy theories: that there are voting irregularities that suggest something is amiss, that the time it will take for results to be tallied is suspiciously long, that Democrats are encouraging explicit voter fraud, that a conspiracy is afoot to let noncitizens vote and potentially sway the election. But there is no evidence that the election is being rigged.

Given that the MAGA right seeded election denialism after Trump lost his bid for the presidency in 2020, such claims are is not surprising. Some kind of “Stop the Steal” redux has long seemed almost inevitable. Less obvious is what the downstream impacts will be. Claims that noncitizens are voting have already led to the erroneous removal of registered voters from the polls, as seen in Texas, but other effects are less clear. Intelligence officials have warned that they anticipate violence around the election. But what does that actually look like, especially if Trump loses?

In 2020, a series of escalating protests in Washington, D.C., culminated in the attack on the Capitol after the turn of the new year. January 6 was energized and encouraged by right-wing protests against COVID-era lockdowns in statehouses across the United States. A protest of hundreds of MAGA protestors had already happened in D.C. by this time in 2020. They served as dry runs for the big one.

This time around, nothing like this has happened in the lead-up to Election Day. Although the past year has seen notable far-right mobilization and activity, and Trump attracts large crowds at his rallies, it hasn’t reached the levels it did in 2020. There haven’t been practice protests across the country that could build up to a massive moment. A January 6-style event is possible, but it would require an abrupt shift in energy, and the will to mobilize would have to materialize almost immediately. And such mobilization would have to happen in a world where people have seen the consequences of January 6, understanding that they could face prosecution and convictions as well.

The right “can’t create momentum out of thin air,” Hannah Gais, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. Still, even if there isn’t energy in the streets, there is momentum online to reject a Trump loss, and that probably is going to escalate. This rhetoric will likely be translated into violence, just not the Capitol-riot kind. Gais fears that the spike in violent rhetoric encouraged by claims of election fraud could spur unpredictable, isolated instances of violence across the country, instead of large, organized January 6-style ones.

The intelligence community is similarly worried. In a memo, reported on by Wired, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis is concerned about an increased “risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents,” heightened by the election season. According to the report, analysts have seen online discussions “preparing for future violence against public officials and federal agents.”Now more and more people, especially on the right, are openly fantasizing about subjecting their enemies to violent retribution, and in some cases, are actually already doing it

These fantasies are now starting to edge their way into reality. Last week, a man punched a poll worker after the official asked him to remove his MAGA hat to comply with electioneering laws. On Monday, hundreds of ballots were destroyed after ballot drop boxes were set on fire in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington.

Other recent political violence has been more concerning. Earlier this year, a man in Pennsylvania beheaded his federal-employee father and called on others to kill federal employees. In a separate incident, a man in Arizona planned a mass shooting at a rap concert in an attempt to start a race war before the election. These events happened months ago, before the election was in full swing and before people started making unfounded claims about it being rigged. Should Trump lose on November 5, Loomer, Shroyer, Greene, and the like are laying the groundwork for very dark things to happen.