Did You Notice? … By the time you read this column, the U.S. presidential nominees for 2024 will be all but assured.
NASCAR will run in conjunction with another national election this year, as the vote for president will come on Tuesday, Nov. 5, five days before the season finale at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, Nov. 10. It’s near certain the election will be a 2020 rematch between two major candidates: Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump.
How does that intersect with NASCAR? Well, it’s virtually impossible these days to have a complete separation between sports and politics. From the national anthem controversies of the mid-2010s to the George Floyd protests in 2020, athletes make their opinions known more than ever to a country that’s become increasingly polarized. Modern technology brings their viewpoint into your living room, your laptop or your phone whether you’re asking for said opinion or not.
But here’s the thing: people turn to sports to escape from that type of stuff. It is entertainment after all, right? For the most part, fans are much more interested in what Driver A can do on the racetrack versus what he thinks about inflation, the border, Biden or Trump. There are elected officials and television news and thousands of would-be pundits for that stuff; just hop on TikTok and we’ll see you back here in an hour (or two, or three …).
Producing some sort of biased opinion on either side, whether it’s NASCAR or a vocal driver, risks alienating some portion of your fan base. Polarization has reached an all-time high, whether you look at marriages of mixed political party affiliations decreasing or people refusing to date someone who voted for a candidate they didn’t like. We’ve largely lost the ability to talk to each other in this country over a difference of opinion, a large can of worms that we don’t want to open here.
The question instead is how involved NASCAR will choose to be in the election this time around. A sport with southern roots had no qualms about supporting the region’s conservative, often racist politics during its early years. Back in 1972, Bill France Jr. once donated to and helped manage the campaign of white supremacist George Wallace some four years after the peak of his power as an independent candidate. The support came nearly a decade after the civil rights movement toppled Jim Crow laws in the region, bringing equality and desegregation into the…
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