by David Brooks
“The first thing to say is that nobody who is in this business has any right to complain. We choose it and it has its pleasures and rewards. But between us, there is no arena in which the character challenges are so large. You don’t get to serve unless you win. To win you have to turn yourself into a product. You have to do things you never thought you would do. You have to put your sense of reserve on the back burner and beg for money and favors. You have to talk endlessly. Walk into a room and talk, walk into a rally and talk, meet with supporters and talk. I call it logorrhea dementia—talking so much you drive yourself insane.
“And what do you talk about? You have to talk endlessly about yourself. Every speech is about me. Every meeting I have is about me. Every article that’s shoved under my nose is about me. When they start writing about you, it’ll happen to you, too.
“At the same time, this is a team sport. You can’t do anything alone, which means you sometimes have to suppress your individual ideas and say and believe the things that are good for the party and the team. You have to be brothers in arms with people you probably wouldn’t like if you gave yourself a minute to think about it. You can’t get too far out in front of your party or the people you serve. You can’t be right too early or interesting too often. You have to support measures you really oppose and sometimes object to things you think are for the good. You have to pretend that when you’re elected you’ll be able to control everything and change everything. You have to pretend that the team myths are true. You have to pretend that the other team is uniquely evil, and would be the ruin of America. Saying otherwise is seen as a threat to party solidarity, and that’s just the way it is.
“You live in a cocoon. I once read a beautiful essay on the life of a tick. A tick can apparently respond to only three types of stimulus. It knows skin. It knows temperature. It knows hair. Those three things constitute the entire umwelt for a tick. ‘Umwelt’ is a word for the relevant environment of any creature. When you’re in this business your umwelt will shrink and be crazy. You will be asked to pay furious attention to minute-by-minute breaking-news stories of no consequence, which you will completely forget by the next day. You will find yourself monitoring the blogs of the twenty-two-year-old kids with their webcams who have been sent out to cover this campaign—kids who have never seen an election before, who have no sense of history and the attention span of a ferret. Because of their presence you can never utter an unrehearsed thought. You can never try out a notion in public.
“All of these things threaten your ability to be honest with yourself, to see the world clearly, to have some basic integrity as a person. And yet we endure this theater of the absurd because there is no other life so filled with consequence. When you are in the White House with me, you will be busier than ever and every decision will be an important decision. Once we’re in the White House, we won’t have to pander to the nation so much. We’ll be able to lead and educate it. When we’re there, you will never want to take time off, and you won’t.
“Once we’re in the White House, we’re not going to swing for singles. We’re going to hit home runs. I refuse to be a timid president. I’m going to be a great president. I have the gifts. I know more about more policy areas than anybody else in this country. I have more political courage than anybody in politics. My attitude is going to be, ‘I’ve got game. Give me the ball.’ ”
Other people, viewing Grace from beyond the reach of his charisma, might have mixed reactions to this little speech. But Erica and Harold were deep in the gravitational pull of the aura. At that moment, they thought it was the most impressive speech they’d ever heard. They thought it showed his amazing self-awareness, his astonishing wisdom, and his remarkable commitment to service. They’d been with him just minutes, but they’d already been caught up in the starstruck love affair that would consume them, especially Erica, for the next eight years.
Political Psychology
Harold had never really paid close attention to an election before. He’d never had access to the internal polling and the inside-strategy memos. After a few days, Erica was more or less submerged within the organization, but Harold got to float around the fringes, with not all that much to do but observe and think. He was struck by the fundamental divide amongst Grace’s advisors. Some thought that campaigning was primarily about delivering goods to voters. Give voters policies that will make their lives better, and they will pay you for services rendered with their votes. Good policies at good prices.
Others thought campaigns were primarily about arousing emotions—forging an elemental bond with groups and voters; inspiring hope with a vision of the future; sending the message “I am just like you. I will react to events as you would react. I will be what you would be.” Politics isn’t primarily about defending interests. It’s primarily about affirming emotions.
Harold, given his background and life’s work, sided with the latter group. Grace was in a tough primary with a flinty New England governor named Thomas Galving. Their policies were basically the same, and so the race had become a battle of social symbols. Grace was the son of a truck driver, and yet he campaigned with a poetic, lyrical style, so he became the candidate of the idealistic educated class. In primary after primary, he won college-educated voters by twenty-five percentage points or more. For the first ten primaries, he seemed to hold every rally within fifty yards of a provost’s office. He didn’t just offer lists of programs. He offered experiences. He offered hope instead of fear, unity instead of discord, intelligence instead of rashness. The message was: “Life is beautiful. Our possibilities are endless. We just have to throw off the shackles of the past and enter a golden tomorrow.”
Galving’s family had been in the United States for three hundred years, and yet he was a pugnacious, combative sort. He positioned himself as a warrior, fighting for your interests. His campaign played up clan loyalty, sticking together, fighting together and defending one another to the death. As the weeks went on, Galving had himself photographed in a bar or on a factory floor every single day. He’d be seen throwing back a shot of whiskey, wearing a flannel shirt, riding shotgun in a pickup truck. The message was: “It’s a rotten world out there. Regular folks are getting the shaft. They need someone who puts toughness and loyalty over independence and ideals.”
The candidates’ methods weren’t subtle, but each approach worked to some degree. In primary after primary Galving won working-class voters by gigantic margins. Grace won the cities, the affluent suburbs, and the university towns. Nationally, Grace won the coasts. Galving won the wide swathe of farming and former manufacturing centers in the South and Midwest, especially where the Scots-Irish had settled centuries before. In Connecticut, Grace won most of the towns that had been settled by the English in the seventeenth century. Galving won most of the towns that had been settled by immigrant groups two centuries after. These were century-old patterns, but they still shaped voting. As weeks went by, campaigning didn’t seem to matter. Demography was destiny. In states with large working-class populations, Galving won. In states with large educated-class populations, Grace won.
Harold was fascinated by these deep tribal cultural currents. His theory was that the political party, like many institutions, had segmented into different subcultures. There was no great hostility between the cultures; they would come together once a nominee was selected. Nonetheless, people in different social classes, defined largely by education level, had developed different unconscious maps of reality. They had developed different communal understandings of what constitutes a good leader, of what sort of world they live in. They had developed different definitions of justice and fairness, liberty, security, and opportunity, without even realizing it.
Voters form infinitely complex mental maps, which are poorly understood even by those who adopt them. They pick up millions of subtle signals from the candidates—from body language, word choice, facial expressions, policy priorities, and biographical details. Somehow voters form emotional affiliations on that basis.
What Harold saw during the campaign certainly didn’t fit the rationalist model of politics, in which voters carefully weigh programs and pick the candidate with the policies that serve their interests. Instead, it fit the social-identity model. People favor the party that seems to be filled with the sort of people they like and admire.
As political scientists Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Schickler argue in their book Partisan Hearts and Minds, most people either inherit their party affiliations from their parents, or they form an attachment to one party or another early in adulthood. Few people switch parties once they hit middle age. Even major historic events such as the world wars and the Watergate scandal do not cause large numbers of people to switch.
Moreover, Green, Palmquist, and Schickler continue, when people do select their own party affiliations, they do not choose parties by comparing platforms and then figuring out where the nation’s interests lie. Drawing on a vast range of data, the authors argue that party attachment is more like attachment to a religious denomination or a social club. People have stereotypes in their heads about what Democrats are like and what Republicans are like, and they gravitate toward the party made up of people like themselves.
Once they have formed an affiliation, people bend their philosophies and their perceptions of reality so they become more and more aligned with members of their political tribe. Paul Goren of the University of Minnesota has used survey data to track the same voters over time. Under the classic model, you’d expect to find that people who valued equal opportunity would become Democrats and that people who valued limited government would become Republicans. In fact, you’re more likely to find that people become Democrats first, then place increasing value on equal opportunity, or they become Republicans first, then place increasing value on limited government. Party affiliation often shapes values, not the other way around.
Party affiliation even shapes people’s perceptions of reality. In 1960 Angus Campbell and others published a classic text, The American Voter, in which they argued that partisanship serves as a filter. A partisan filters out facts that are inconsistent with the party’s approved worldview and exaggerates facts that confirm it. Over the years, some political scientists have criticized that observation. But many researchers are coming back to Campbell’s conclusion: People’s perceptions are blatantly biased by partisanship.
For example, the Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels has pointed to survey data collected after the Reagan and Clinton presidencies. In 1988 voters were asked if they thought the nation’s inflation rate had fallen during the Reagan presidency. In fact, it had. The inflation rate fell from 13.5 percent to 4.1 percent. But only 8 percent of strong Democrats said the rate had fallen. More than 50 percent of partisan Democrats believed that inflation had risen under Reagan. Strong Republicans had a much sunnier and more accurate impression of economic trends. Forty-seven percent said inflation had declined.
Then, at the end of the Clinton presidency, voters were asked similar questions about how the country had fared in the previous eight years. This time, it was Republicans who were inaccurate and negative. Democrats were much more positive. Bartels concludes that partisan loyalties have a pervasive influence on how people see the world. They reinforce and exaggerate differences of opinion between Republicans and Democrats.
Some people believe that these cognitive flaws can be eradicated with more education, but that doesn’t seem to be true, either. According to research by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook University, educated voters may be more factually right most of the time, but they are still factually wrong a significant amount of the time. They are actually less willing to correct their false opinions than less-informed voters because they are so confident that they are correct about everything.
The overall impression one gets from this work is that the search for a candidate is an aesthetic search—a search for a candidate who clicks. Some of the things that influence a voter’s decisions can be instantaneous and seemingly unimportant. As noted earlier, Alex Todorov and others at Princeton showed their research subjects black-and-white photographs of the faces of rival political candidates. The subjects were asked which of the candidates looked more competent. (The subjects were not familiar with either of the candidates).
The candidate who was perceived as the more competent by the people looking at the photographs won 72 percent of the actual Senate races in which they were involved, and 67 percent of the actual House races. The research subjects could impressively predict the actual winners even if they were given just one second to look at the candidates’ faces. This result has been replicated internationally as well. In one study called “Looking Like a Winner,” Chappell Lawson, Gabriel Lenz, and others gave people in the U.S. and India quick glimpses of people running for office in Mexico and Brazil. Despite ethnic and cultural differences, the Americans and the Indians agreed about which candidate would be more effective. The American and Indian preferences also predicted the Mexican and Brazilian election results with surprising accuracy.
A study by Daniel Benjamin of Cornell University and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago found that research subjects could predict the outcome of gubernatorial races with some accuracy just by looking at ten-second silent video clips of the candidates talking. Their accuracy dropped if the sound was turned up. A study by Jonah Berger and others at Stanford found that the location of a voting booth can also influence voter decisions. Voters who went to polling stations in schools are more likely to support tax increases to fund education than voters who went to other polling stations. Voters who were shown a photograph of a school were also more likely to support a tax increase than voters not shown such a photograph.
Some of these are experiments conducted in a lab. In real campaigns, the races go on and on, month after month. The voters make snap judgments by the minute, hour, day, week, and month, and their instant perceptions accrete to form a thick and complex web of valuation.
To say that voter decisions are emotional does not mean that voters are stupid and irrational. Since unconscious processes are faster and more complicated than conscious ones, this intuitional search can be quite sophisticated. While following a political campaign, voters are both rational and intuitive. The two modes of cognition inform and shape each other.
The Underdebate
At the end of the day, Grace just ground down Galving. There were more of his kind of people than there were of Galving’s kind of people. He won the party nomination, and within months all was forgiven as members of the two wings of the party went into battle with the other party. They were united by a new us-them distinction.
The general election was bigger and, at least on the surface, stupider. In the primary fight, everybody knew everybody on all sides. It was a fight within the family. But the general election was a combat against a different party, and almost nobody knew anybody on the other side. The “others” were like creatures from a different solar system, and it was convenient to believe the worst.
The general view on Grace’s campaign was that the people running the other campaign were uniquely evil and devilishly clever. The people in Grace’s camp believed that their side was riven with internal disputes (because of their superior intellects and independence of mind), whereas the other side marched with totalitarian unity and precision (because of their clonelike conformity). Their side was thoughtful but fractious, while the other side was mindless but disciplined.
By the fall, the campaign was just a series of jet hops. Grace would hold rallies at one airport hangar after another, in an effort to hit as many TV markets in a day as possible. Most of the internal campaign debates seemed to be about where to put the risers for the TV cameras and how high they should be.
The candidates traded insults relayed at BlackBerry speed. The media kept track of who won each week, day, and hour, though it’s not clear that these victories meant anything to the actual electorate. Grace’s supporters turn
ed bipolar. A senator would come on the campaign plane one day, exultant over certain victory. The next day the same senator would be back, in despair over the prospect of certain defeat.
There were consultants all around honing the message. “Never say ‘families’; say, ‘working families.’ Never say ‘spend’; say ‘invest.’ ” These subtle word alterations were used to provoke entirely different associations in voters’ minds.
The most important part of the campaign was taking place away from the candidate, among the consultants who designed the TV commercials. They were pitching them toward voters who didn’t normally pay attention to politics and who were woefully misinformed about where each candidate stood on the issues.
Weird issues popped up and became the subject of furious insults between the two campaigns. Grace and his opponent spent a week furiously accusing the other of causing childhood obesity, though it was not clear that either of them had caused it or could do anything about it. A minor crisis in Lebanon turned into a major campaign showdown, with each side demonstrating toughness and resolve and accusing the other of treason. Mini-scandals erupted. People in Grace’s camp were genuinely outraged by a leaked memo from the other side that included the phrase “How to fuck them over.” They were genuinely unmoved by the memos produced by their own campaign with the exact same wording.
The process seemed stupid and superficial. But Harold couldn’t get over the crowds. There was real passion at each event—thousands of people, and sometime tens of thousands, roaring their support for Grace with some sort of orgiastic hope.
Given what he had learned so far about life, Harold concluded that all the campaign trivialities were really triggers. They served to trigger deep chains of associations in people’s minds. Grace would spend an hour getting photographed at a flag factory. The event was stupid on its face, but somehow the sight of him holding all those American flags triggered some set of unconscious associations. Another day, they put him on a stool and he held a rally in Monument Valley, where all those John Wayne westerns were set. It was a tacky device, but it triggered another set of associations.