Emotion and Voting
David Brooks is very convincing in his column when he writes about how large an influence emotion is on voting and candidate preference. He writes, “voters — all of us — make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness.” I have to state my own biases here. As you all know, I’m an Obama supporter. Sure, of the three major electable candidates, I feel that Obama and I are eye-to-eye on most things, and I genuinely think that he would be a better president than any other feasible candidate on the field. But it’s hard for me to think of what Obama would need to do for him to lose my support. When I took the implicit bias test for Democratic candidates, the ranking was just as I expected — Obama first, then Clinton and Richardson, and Edwards in last.
But Brooks is probably overstating the importance of emotion on voting, at least he’s ignoring other, more important factors. For instance, there are people for ideological reasons, say 40% of the voting public, that simply won’t vote for the GOP candidate, no matter how they instinctively respond to the candidate’s face. Also, these emotional responses are framed by how the media treats candidates. So when the media essentially decides that Edwards, Hillary and Obama are the three front-runners, our instantaneous responses are affected by the presentation of the candidates. People who would otherwise respond well to Dodd and Biden see “second track candidate”, not “senior Democratic senator with over 25 years of committed liberal legislative experience.”
Brooks also can’t account for just how radically the fortunes of a candidate can change. For instance, Huckabee had enough media exposure through debates for most GOP voters to have seen his face and get a general idea of what he was about — an emotional response could be formed. But then he surged, his polling numbers went from single digits to the mid 30s in just a few weeks. Did the emotional responses radically change? There could have been a positive feedback effect, as Huckabee rose in the polls, the media framed him as a viable candidate, and so people’s emotional responses altered accordingly, but it would be a marginal effect at best.
What about McCain, he was left for dead in national polls on a few months ago. He’s been a nationally recognized Republican since 2000, so it’s unlikely people’s unconscious responses changed very much. McCain’s campaign didn’t change at all, he has always been in the “war hero” category that Brooks identifies as being important for drawing Republican support, it seems like the “rational” explanations of political behavior would hold true. In the summer, he was the major advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, which GOP primary voters detested, and his support crashed. But as the GOP realized, they didn’t really have anyone else who was electable or consistently conservative, and so McCain’s support went up once again. No 700 millisecond reactions to images needed to explain that!
