Arshad Hasan, I think, then with Democracy for America, told a group of us trainees to remember we were not normal people. Normal people don’t spent their weekends in campaign schools. They don’t eat, breathe, and sleep politics.
I coach canvassers never even to think voters are stupid. They aren’t stupid. They’re busy – with work, kids, school, church, soccer practice, etc. Most are not evaluating a policy checklist as much as reading signals that tell them a candidate or party has their back. They’re normal.
So it was this tweet from Iowa came across my feed via an L.A. Times correspondent:
Ridicule such voters if you like losing, but their motivations aren’t easily distilled into neat red & blue categories. Mark Meadows’ NC-11 is the only district in the state that voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, narrowly. The district went heavily for Donald Trump in the general election. Some Sanders voters flipped to Trump. Many Democratic regulars did too. Many of the latter are holdovers who simply never switched parties after the 1960s.
Chris Hayes responded to Matt Pearce’s tweet with observations he’d made in Wisconsin in 2004:
Undecided voters aren’t as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We’re giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man’s house, she still couldn’t make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn’t have much luck.
But disparaging such voters’ lack of “a basic rationality” assumes voters make their voting decisions rationally, or should, is like saying you made a rational decision to fall in love. It misses a great deal of subtext. More subliminal factors are at play, other signals. Pheromones and whatnot. That’s how it is with some voters, especially those for whom social issues matter most, wrapped up in concerns about jobs and maintaining the existing pecking order.
Americans of means sometimes don’t choose candidates, they invest in them looking for a return in financial terms, social status, or both. For your consideration: Gordon Sondland and Lev Parnas. That’s rational, if not calculating. For others, it’s more unconscious. They take the “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like” approach. It’s not wrong, just different, the way people having different learning styles.
As smart as progressives like to think they are, we often miss this. Rationality is overvalued. Emotional intelligence matters in these personal interactions:
A candidate’s attitudes toward “people like me” thus become a powerful heuristic. If a candidate generally likes people like me, then it seems plausible that he will look out for my interests in a wide range of scenarios.
Hayes went on to say his 2004 post that while undecided voters care about politics, “they just didn’t enjoy politics.” Many undecideds he met in Wisconsin could not name a single issue of importance to them. They simply did not identify complaints in their lives as having any connection to politics or that they might have political remedies.
In this context, Bush’s victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed “values” as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn’t the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like “character” and “morals.” Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values–we all know what’s right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don’t even grasp what issues are?
That’s why expanding our suite of tools beyond facts and issues is key to reaching many voters. Rationality is overvalued. Emotional intelligence is lacking in our politics. If it seems as if we’re speaking different languages sometimes, it is because we are. Peers planning trips abroad will bone up on the local culture, learn some basic phrases, etc., to enhance their visits. They just won’t show voters in the next county the same courtesy. A new friend observed Friday how the culture in the South is very different from back North, both in good ways and in bad.
Perhaps that is why trainers tell canvassers their job is not to engage in a debate with voters. The job is to smile, listen, drop the literature, and most of all leave a good impression. It’s not to impress anyone with your smarts and superior command of the issues. That’s the candidate’s job, but only a part of it. Tone and body language speak volumes.