How to Win an Election
Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2020 8:57 pm
I've made a few references to the book I started reading yesterday - The Political Brain.
The article below (written by the book's author) gives one an excellent idea of what that excellent book has to say.
Vinny
How to Win an Election
The high-stakes science of campaign messaging reveals that success at the ballot box hinges more on how you feel about things than on what you think about them. Is anyone getting it right?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/arti ... n-election#_=_
I have found that it is sometimes difficult for people to swallow the truth about reason. But it’s important for anyone who cares about the outcome of elections. It’s not that rational thinking is irrelevant when we pull that voting lever, but that we think for a reason, and the reasons are always emotional in nature. The only things we reason about are the things that we care about. Our feelings are our guide to action. Reason provides a map of where we want to go, but first we have to want to go there.
In politics as in the rest of life, we think because we feel.
Politics, then, is less a marketplace of ideas than a marketplace of emotions. To be successful, a candidate needs to reach voters in ways that penetrate the heart at least as much as the head. That makes political messaging critical—and perhaps about to determine the course of American history.
The Political Brain
In 2007, as a research and clinical psychologist who had watched one Democratic presidential candidate after another go down in flames, I researched and wrote a book titled The Political Brain. It dissected how candidates might talk with voters if they started with an understanding of the way our minds actually work.
As was readily apparent from their campaigns over decades, Democrats and Republicans have had two very different implicit visions of the mind of the voter. Republicans talked about their values, such as faith, family, and limited government. Their think tanks are feel tanks and fuel tanks, generating and testing what the brilliant wordsmith on the right, Frank Luntz, called “words that work.”
Democrats, in contrast, talked about their policy prescriptions, bewitched by the dictum that “a campaign is a debate on the issues.” Their think tanks brought in fellows to work out policies based on the best available science. Perhaps blinded by their indifference to emotion, they left to chance the selling of those policies to the public.
Armed with a vision of the mind in which good ideas, even when described to people in terms they might not understand or find emotionally compelling, would somehow sell themselves, Democrats consistently lost elections. At the time I wrote the book, only one Democrat, Bill Clinton, had been elected and re-elected to the presidency since FDR six decades earlier.
Survey data across decades of elections show that success or failure at the ballot box tends to reflect, first and foremost, voters’ feelings toward the parties, the candidates, and the economy, in that order. Then come feelings toward candidates’ specific attributes, such as competence or empathy. Feelings on any given issue come in a distant fifth in predicting election outcomes. Voters’ beliefs about the issues barely register. And except for political junkies, most voters are neither interested in detailed policy prescriptions nor competent to assess them.
What voters want to know are the answers to two questions: Does this person, and does this party, share my values? And do they understand and care about people like me? Those turn out to be pretty rational questions. No one can predict a black swan or coronavirus pandemic, but you’re likely to feel comfortable with the decisions of leaders who share your values and care about people like you.
The article below (written by the book's author) gives one an excellent idea of what that excellent book has to say.
Vinny
How to Win an Election
The high-stakes science of campaign messaging reveals that success at the ballot box hinges more on how you feel about things than on what you think about them. Is anyone getting it right?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/arti ... n-election#_=_
I have found that it is sometimes difficult for people to swallow the truth about reason. But it’s important for anyone who cares about the outcome of elections. It’s not that rational thinking is irrelevant when we pull that voting lever, but that we think for a reason, and the reasons are always emotional in nature. The only things we reason about are the things that we care about. Our feelings are our guide to action. Reason provides a map of where we want to go, but first we have to want to go there.
In politics as in the rest of life, we think because we feel.
Politics, then, is less a marketplace of ideas than a marketplace of emotions. To be successful, a candidate needs to reach voters in ways that penetrate the heart at least as much as the head. That makes political messaging critical—and perhaps about to determine the course of American history.
The Political Brain
In 2007, as a research and clinical psychologist who had watched one Democratic presidential candidate after another go down in flames, I researched and wrote a book titled The Political Brain. It dissected how candidates might talk with voters if they started with an understanding of the way our minds actually work.
As was readily apparent from their campaigns over decades, Democrats and Republicans have had two very different implicit visions of the mind of the voter. Republicans talked about their values, such as faith, family, and limited government. Their think tanks are feel tanks and fuel tanks, generating and testing what the brilliant wordsmith on the right, Frank Luntz, called “words that work.”
Democrats, in contrast, talked about their policy prescriptions, bewitched by the dictum that “a campaign is a debate on the issues.” Their think tanks brought in fellows to work out policies based on the best available science. Perhaps blinded by their indifference to emotion, they left to chance the selling of those policies to the public.
Armed with a vision of the mind in which good ideas, even when described to people in terms they might not understand or find emotionally compelling, would somehow sell themselves, Democrats consistently lost elections. At the time I wrote the book, only one Democrat, Bill Clinton, had been elected and re-elected to the presidency since FDR six decades earlier.
Survey data across decades of elections show that success or failure at the ballot box tends to reflect, first and foremost, voters’ feelings toward the parties, the candidates, and the economy, in that order. Then come feelings toward candidates’ specific attributes, such as competence or empathy. Feelings on any given issue come in a distant fifth in predicting election outcomes. Voters’ beliefs about the issues barely register. And except for political junkies, most voters are neither interested in detailed policy prescriptions nor competent to assess them.
What voters want to know are the answers to two questions: Does this person, and does this party, share my values? And do they understand and care about people like me? Those turn out to be pretty rational questions. No one can predict a black swan or coronavirus pandemic, but you’re likely to feel comfortable with the decisions of leaders who share your values and care about people like you.
