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A lack of trust in the election processes and public policy systems challenges an integral
part of America's representative democracy: free and fair elections. When citizens feel
disenfranchised, the damage to democracy can be significant. If left unchanged, or if it
gets worse, the consequences for democracy can be severe as citizens increasingly
become disenfranchised. The impact of the media on then-Trump supporters for the 2020
election and whether the mischaracterization of Trump supporters by the media
negatively affected those voters' sense of connection to government and public policy
processes was analyzed. The goal was to determine if Trump voters felt the media
mischaracterized them and what that impact was on their trust in government institutions,
public policy, and other areas of their lives. The theoretical foundation, the narrative
policy framework (NPF), was used to analyze the narratives from interviews of 20 White,
male Trump voters aged 30-65 in response to a series of questions asking how they felt
the media characterized them. The study's key results were that 82% of the participants
felt disenfranchised by how the media framed them as voters. The NPF plot categories
that were dominant were "Story of Helplessness and a Lack of Control" (35%) and
"Story of Decline" (34%). The positive social change implications include exploring
potential issues with how the media affects essential political and policy discourse and
providing the insights to build towards progress with media characterizations' negative
impact on citizen connectedness to policymaking, legislative processes, elections, and
democracy.
