Hopefully, this trend will continue. Ideally, politics in the future will have so little tangible effect on peoples' lives that they won't have to pay attention to it at all.
I first formed this idea when the debates over Iraq revved up to full force, BTW. I observed that there was a hardcore legion of folks who were simultaneously (1) emotionally, almost psychotically rage-filled over Bush's decision to invade Iraq, and (2) whose lives were not and are not affected by "the Iraq war" in any measurable, tangible sense whatsoever. (You can find some such people - Buchananites and Ron Paul supporters, for example - on Free Republic, BTW)
In fact, this faction seems to constitute the vast majority of the "anti-war" crowd. I realized that to these people, "politics" was basically just a TV show they felt very very strongly about. And like when Cagney & Lacey was cancelled, or Felicity cut her hair, or Bo & Luke Duke were replaced by their cousins, when Bush decided to invade Iraq, this was a "plot turn" that the "politics" followers considered unacceptable even though its reality for their actual lives is essentially nil.
Of course, the phenomenon exists on both sides of the spectrum :-)
Just the opposite occurs. The less people pay attention, the more government intrudes into their lives.