Emotions and Elections

By Aaron Reid
February 18, 2008



Barack Obama has won 8 straight states since Super Tuesday, including an unexpected sweep of the Chesapeake Primary. Some of these wins have been by 30 points or more. His “yes, we can” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY) video on you tube has more than 4 million hits. There is a tremendous emotional swell behind Barack that has even the Clinton organizational juggernaut trembling. So today’s topic is emotion and politics. We know that emotion moves markets and drives consumer purchases (think about the millions of people who threw down $600 for an iPhone when it came out last June – including myself!), but what about electorates?

Political pundits talk about the factors that win an election at a level of explanation that hovers between demographic and behavioral descriptions. A blunt example of a demographic level of explanation is the advice Barack Obama is getting from the media on his need to win the Hispanic and Latino vote. Talk about a surface level explanation and analysis! And this comes from the “best poltical team on television” (CNN’s tagline, mentioned 10-20 times per hour during coverage). This begs for a deeper level of explanation, this begs the question “How?”.http://blog.sentientinsight.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif

Another example of surface level demographic explanation can be seen watching John King masterfully work the e-map of the US on CNN, pointing out whole swaths of states that will go for Huckabee versus McCain. This great theater is truly impressive and entertaining. It is a demographic level of explanation that is actionable, it tells the McCain camp where to focus in terms of thwarting Huckabee’s advances, and also which areas are his strongholds where he can expect to win. But this level of explanation, while wildly entertaining to people who like watching politics, is also unsatisfying if you’re trying to win elections, you need to know not only where to focus but what to focus on.

Another popular level of explanation is the behavioral/demographic explanation. Examples of this include “Soccer Moms” and more recently “PBR democrats” and “Dunkin Donuts Democrats”. Some of this is purely to satisfy our need to group people and to have a clever tag phrases to throw around to those “in the know”. But it also communicates something fundamental that the group shares, perhaps a set of values with which a political message might resonate. This level of explanation is interesting and useful, but it still requires that next step, it requires knowing what will resonate within that target demographic – and I’ll argue it needs to be more than a sharing of rational values.

It amazes me that political pundits, such as David Gergen, still gain traction in talk shows with statements like “I don’t think that people go into the booth thinking about which issues the candidate supports. I think voters vote based on how they think the candidate is going to make them feel at night in their living room.” Is it possible, with as important and over analyzed as politics are, that we still don’t know why people do what they do in the voting booth? Clearly, we’re in need of a deeper level of explanation of voting behavior.

A more powerful demo-behavioral level of explanation, in the same vein as above, is the “Security Mom” segment of the electorate in 2004. I’ll argue that this group tag is more effective because it communicates something of emotional value to the segment. Security concerns of mothers are real, emotional and therefore very important to understand. Assuaging fear through effective messaging to this segment of the population will likely drive ballot booth behavior.

This brings me back to Barack. Is there any other candidate that is generating more positive approach emotion in this race? Watch the will.i.am youtube clip, and I think it’s hard to argue that anyone is even in his league when it comes to positive approach emotion. He should be a runaway winner with this, no? But before we get out the anointing oil – we have to consider the other emotions at play in this race. What of the deep emotions felt by those who see in Hillary the best chance for a woman President in the history of our country. For many, this emotion outweighs anything Obama can manage to stir within them. And think of McCain’s positioning on the “transcendental challenge of our generation: battling Islamic extremism across the world”, talk about an emotion-laden challenge, and the rhetoric is even more powerful when spoken by the steely faced veteran. And haven’t we heard for years how the Republican base will turn out in droves to turn Hillary away from the oval office? In the summer of 2000, I sat at lunch in a Mexican restaurant in Texas and listened to a friend at the table give a seething response to the question “What don’t you like about Hillary?” – he must have said the word “socialist” at least 10 times in his rapid, forceful and venomous response – talk about powerful negative avoidance emotions driving behavior! These emotions are real and they drive more than lunchtime conversation among friends, I’d argue they drive votes. I would also argue that it is this more fundamental level of explanation, the emotional push and pull within an electorate, that is most important to understand for those trying to win elections.

So the questions are: why don’t we know why people do what they do in the ballot booth? Aren’t we better predictors of behavior than that? Do you buy the emotional explanation of voting behavior, and if not, why not?

  • Share Insight
Aaron Reid

By:

Founder & CEO, Sentient Decision Science, Inc.


Archives

Categories

Contact us for more information about Sentient Decision Science and our groundbreaking research.