Often, the candidates best informed on policy have the most trouble connecting with voters.
Part of the problem—for every type of campaign, but especially for policy-focused candidates—is that emotions play a central role in voter choice and decision making, but campaigns and candidates too often focus only on marshaling logic and data when communicating with voters. Campaigns often treat an election as a courtroom involving a case on the tax code where the candidate who has the best argument and evidence will win.
This approach misses the fundamental truth of how people truly make decisions.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the author of The Righteous Mind, an examination of how people reason, think, and feel.
Haidt uses a vivid metaphor: “the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.” Data and words form the stream of our conscious mind—the rider—but the elephant represents the majority of our entire mental processes, which occur below the surface of the conscious mind in the region of emotions and intuition. Haidt does not argue that the mind is divided, but rather that the elephant constantly moves and pulls the rider.
Haidt’s point is that emotions and intuition play a central, driving role in human reasoning and decision making; humans are more than just data-crunching machines.
The upshot for the GOP as we enter the home stretch of the mid-term elections is two-fold. Republican candidates must frame their arguments in such a way that they appeal to the rider and the elephant—the head and the heart; and any campaign that doesn’t have a way to measure and map voter intuitions and emotions on policies and candidates will be left in the dust in 2022 and beyond.
To quote Ben Shapiro, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” but candidates better start caring about how the facts—and how they’re communicated—make their voters feel. Cygnal’s Emotive Analysis gives campaigns the tool they need to see and understand both the rider and the elephant. Facts and policy matter, but whether or not they are framed in the context of moral intuitions voters already have is the difference between winning only an abstract argument on the merits, or winning an election, too.
If you’re interested in the latter, my inbox is always open: [email protected]