WASHINGTON: Most Americans are feeling a lot of emotions heading into Election Day, but excitement is not one of them.
A new poll from The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that about 7 in 10 Americans report feeling anxious or frustrated about the 2024 presidential campaign, and a similar share say they’re interested.
Only about one-third say they feel excited.
There’s a broad feeling of uncertainty hanging over the 2024 presidential contest during the last week of the campaign. The race is competitive nationally and in key swing states, according to recent polls, with neither Democrat Kamala Harris nor Republican Donald Trump showing a measurable advantage. At the same time, the candidates have offered closing arguments that are in stark contrast with each other, with Harris arguing that Trump is obsessed with revenge and his own personal needs, while Trump referred to Harris at a rally on Sunday night as “a trainwreck who has destroyed everything in her path.”
Some groups are even more anxious than they were four years ago, even though that election took place in the midst of a deadly pandemic. In 2020, an AP-NORC poll found that about two-thirds of Americans were anxious about the election, which is not statistically significant from the new result. But for partisans, anxiety is dialed a little higher. About 8 in 10 Democrats say anxious describes how they are feeling now, up slightly from around three-quarters in the last election. About two-thirds of Republicans are anxious, a moderate uptick from around 6 in 10 in 2020.
Independents, by contrast, haven’t shifted meaningfully, and they’re also feeling less worried than Democrats or Republicans. About half say they are anxious, similar to the finding in 2020.
Other emotions have gotten more intense compared to past election cycles, including excitement. About one-third of Americans report feeling excited about the 2024 campaign, up from around one-quarter in 2016. But a majority of Americans say they are not excited about this year’s race.
One thing has stayed fairly constant, though: Americans’ level of frustration with the campaign. Roughly 7 in 10 Americans say frustrated describes their emotional state, similar to 2020.
For those Americans, though, there is light on the horizon — soon, the election will be over.

MANILA: Long one of the world’s top sources of ocean plastic, the Philippines is hoping new legislation requiring big companies to pay for waste solutions will help clean up its act.
Last year, its “Extended Producer Responsibility” statute came into force — the first in Southeast Asia to impose penalties on companies over plastic waste.
The experiment has shown both the promise and the pitfalls of the tool, which could be among the measures in a treaty to tackle plastic pollution that countries hope to agree this year.
The Philippines, with a population of 120 million, generates some 1.7 million metric tonnes of post-consumer plastic waste a year, according to the World Bank.
Of that, a third goes to landfills and dumpsites, with 35 percent discarded on open land.
The EPR law is intended to achieve “plastic neutrality” by forcing large businesses to reduce plastic pollution through product design and removing waste from the environment.
They are obliged to cover an initial 20 percent of their plastic packaging footprint, calculated based on the weight of plastic packaging they put into the market.
The obligation will rise to a ceiling of 80 percent by 2028.
The law covers a broad range of plastics, including flexible types that are commercially unviable for recycling and thus often go uncollected.
It does not however ban any plastics, including the popular but difficult to recover and recycle single-use sachets common in the Philippines.
So far, around half the eligible companies under the law have launched EPR programs.
Over a thousand more must do so by end-December or face fines of up to 20 million pesos ($343,000) and even revocation of their operating licenses.
The law removed 486,000 tonnes of plastic waste from the environment last year, Environment Undersecretary Jonas Leones said.
That topped the 2023 target and is “part of a broader strategy to reduce the environmental impact of plastic pollution, particularly given the Philippines’ status as one of the largest contributors to marine plastic waste globally.”
The law allows companies to outsource their obligations to “producer responsibility organizations,” many of which use a mechanism called plastic credits.
These allow companies to buy a certificate that a metric ton of plastic has been removed from the environment and either recycled, upcycled or “co-processed” — burned for energy.
PCX Solutions, one of the country’s biggest players, offers local credits priced around $100 for collection and co-processing of mixed plastics to over $500 for collection and recycling of ocean-bound PET plastic.
The model is intended to channel money into the underfunded waste collection sector and encourage collection of plastic that is commercially unviable for recycling.
“It’s manna from heaven,” former streetsweeper Marita Blanco said.
A widowed mother-of-five, Blanco lives in Manila’s low-income San Andres district and buys plastic bottles, styrofoam and candy wrappers for two pesos (3.4 US cents) a kilogramme (2.2 pounds).
She then sells them at a 25 percent mark-up to US charity Friends of Hope, which works with PCX Solutions to process them.
“I didn’t know that there was money in garbage,” she said.
“If I do not look down on the task of picking up garbage, my financial situation will improve.”
Friends of Hope managing director Ilusion Farias said the project was making a visible difference to an area often strewn with discarded plastic.
“Two years ago, I think you would have seen a lot dirtier street,” she said.
“Behavioral change is really slow, and it takes a really long time.”
Among those purchasing credits is snack producer Mondelez, which has opted to jump directly to “offsetting” 100 percent of its plastic footprint.
“It costs company budgets... but that’s really something that we just said we would commit to do for the environment,” Mondelez Philippines corporate and government affairs official Caitlin Punzalan said.
But while companies have lined up to buy plastic credits, there has been less movement on stemming the flow of new plastic, including through redesign.
“Upstream reduction is not really easy,” said PCX Solutions managing director Stefanie Beitien.
“There is no procurement department in the world that accepts a 20 percent higher packaging price just because it’s the right thing to do.”
And while PCX credits cannot be claimed against plastic that is landfilled, they do allow for waste to be burned, with the ash then used for cement.
“It’s still linear, not circular, because you’re destroying the plastic and you’re still generating virgin plastic,” acknowledged Leones of the environment ministry.
Still, the law remains a “very strong policy,” according to Floradema Eleazar, an official with the UN Development Programme.
But “we will not see immediate impacts right now, or tomorrow,” she said.
“It would require really massive behavioral change for everyone to make sure that this happens.”