My understanding of the poli-sci consensus is that voters care about whatever the press and political leaders signal they should care about it. So when we give the "lol nobody cares" treatment to a violation of federal law we're not describing reality, we're creating it.
The press went nuts over murder hornets for a month, and for a month everyone was obsessed with murder hornets, if you're looking for a recent real-world case study of this dynamic.
More on this because it's still bugging me: in every single swing state I checked, searched interest for "Hatch Act" spiked above the Kim K Threshold of Widespread Interest in the past couple days. People outside the beltway are interested and they care about this. 
One thing I've noticed is that most "people outside the beltway don't care about X" takes are written by people who live inside the beltway. Those takes are typically much more revealing of their authors' biases than anything else.
