For as long as I can remember, my mother dismissed politics as something beyond her. She regarded it as a game she didn't really understand played by people who weren't "real" and who didn't live in the same world that she knew. It didn't, she said, impact her life, so it didn't really matter who ran or who was elected.
For most of my life, this strategy worked for her. It was pretty easy to keep up the pretense that a) she couldn't change anything and b) her life was pretty much the same no matter who was in office.
Then came eight years of George W. Bush.