Pulse Pod 42 – Dr. Peter Wish

On this week’s episode of the Pulse Pod, Chris and Brent are joined by Dr. Peter Wish, a campaign coach and strategist to political candidates, and author of the book, “The Candidate’s 7 Deadly Sins: Using Emotional Optics to Turn Political Vices into Virtues.” Together, they dive into the voter’s psychology, taking a close look to the major role that emotion plays when the time comes to vote.


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Key Takeaways:

  • Emotion is the critical factor that binds people to a candidate. It’s been proven that people actually vote with their gut and not with their brain. Therefore, it’s essential that a candidate connects with voters on an emotional level, creating a strong feeling of likeability and trust.  
  • Voters are driven, primarily, by survival instincts. On that note, current issues such as inflation and crime rate are, in a basic level, directly related to how good or not people reckon they will survive.
  • The Trump campaign can be taken as a clear example of how emotion can have a massive impact on voters, as President Donald Trump was able to tap into the gut of disenfranchised, angry people who felt left out and were disillusioned with the established system.   
  • Connecting emotionally with independent swing voters can provide a huge advantage in a political race, given that those voters on the margin often times make up their mind at the very end, making a crucial difference concerning who wins and who doesn’t.
  • Cygnal’s Emotive Analysis is a revolutionary tool that allows to quantify primary emotions such as anger, anxiety, and fear through asking some specific, open-ended questions that aim to bypass the prefrontal cortex and get some gut responses that can then be analyzed and translated into useful data. 
  • There are three basic emotions that motivate voters: anger, enthusiasm, and anxiety, with anger being the most influential. Understanding and being aware of voters’ emotions is key for creating compelling targeted messaging that can help guide a certain group of voters towards a particular candidate.
  • Mirroring is an ideal way to establish a bond between a candidate and a voter. If a candidate looks and talks like the people he or she is addressing, that will certainly help ensure a confidence and trust component in a faster way.

Cygnal · Dr. Peter Wish – Pulse Pod #42