October 27, 2024

By Stephen Stofka

This week’s letter is about our vote, our political perceptions and institutions. This past week, an NPR reporter asked an undecided voter in Pennsylvania which candidate they were leaning to. The voter responded that he did not like the way the Biden administration had handled inflation. Since Harris was part of that administration, he was leaning toward Trump. The NPR reporter did not present the voter with the information that it was Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, appointed by Trump, who had been chiefly responsible for the government’s response to inflation. Would this new information have an effect on the voter’s thinking? Would the voter hold Trump partly responsible for the surge of inflation during the pandemic recovery? That dialog was never developed. I have noticed that reporters from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) develop a more proactive dialog with those they interview. The resulting interviews are more lively and informative than those conducted by reporters in U.S. news media.

Candidates in presidential elections frame issues to elevate them from the temporary to the eternal. In The Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw (1998) tell the story of Samuel Insull, a tycoon in the electricity industry during the 1920s, who wanted to build a sprawling infrastructure that would supply electricity to every home and business in America. His empire collapsed during the Depression and investors lost 99% of their capital. Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) ran on a campaign that included a promise “’to get’ the Insulls” (p. 47). FDR had elevated a case of speculation and overreach into an eternal battle where the rich preyed on the poor. His administration pursued the tycoon as he sought refuge in various European countries. Finally, Greece extradited the man back to the U.S. where he stood trial for fraud. Prosecutors could not convince a jury that Insull was guilty of anything more than ambition. His investors were mostly professionals, people who hoped to capitalize on that ambition. The jury speedily exonerated Insull.

One voter in Pennsylvania explained to the same NPR reporter that he needed to sit down and study the issues. Political campaigns must craft an issue complicated by dense details and conflicting principles into a clear and simple tale that appeals to the emotions and morals of voters. There are four aspects of most issues: the practical, the moral, the intellectual and the emotional. Repeated studies of patients whose right and left brains have been separated by accident or surgery indicate that each of these aspects is processed by different parts of our brain. To reduce our “brain load” we use shortcuts in our reasoning process to guide us through a jungle of complexity. I will note that Nelson et al. (2013) found little biological evidence for the idea that the processing of various tasks are localized to either half of the brain.

Steckler et al. (2017) found that many of us determine an action’s morality based on intention rather than outcome. Their research indicated that we process those types of moral judgments with our right brain. Many researchers have concluded that emotional responses are mainly generated in the right brain (Gainotti, 2019). Sorting through the practical details and isolating the principles involved in an issue involve the left side of the brain. We don’t carry a handy little tool in our pocket to consider these various aspects to get to the heart of the matter. After a long day at work, it is tiring just to think about the more complex issues. To keep it simple, political campaigns play to just one aspect, but not to the practical details where the momentum of a campaign narrative can get lost.

Political campaigns are sales campaigns. Central to sales practice is the KISS principle – Keep it simple, Stupid. The lessons of history are too nuanced and contradictory for a sales campaign. Candidates try to hypnotize voters with one or two shiny issues. They target the right brain which has a prominent role in emotional and moral judgments. They make up details to support their emotional or moral argument. Anything to stoke outrage, anger and moral condemnation. Simple and short lies with little or no evidence work the best. Scapegoat a minority group. Immigrants eating pets. Jews sacrificing Christian children. Catholic voters wanting to make Catholicism the national religion. In southern states, many black men were lynched after a hasty accusation of  raping a white woman.

Voters are beset with distortions from opposing campaigns. Most of the evidence for or against a candidate overwhelms many voters so they concentrate on a few key details. They rely on their own party affiliation, a few key media sources, a family member or a friend. Campaign rules do not prohibit lying and candidates have little to gain from nuance or truth. A Congressional Research Service analysis found that 36% of current House members and 51% of Senate members are lawyers. They have learned how to shape facts and issues into a convincing argument.

America was founded by the wealthy to be a plutocratic republic with the trappings of a democracy. To preserve a plutocratic Constitution, the founders made it difficult to amend the rules. The Electoral College was designed to check the popular will. The rules of the Senate and House concentrate power in a small elite of party leaders and committee chairs. In a plutocracy, the wealthy find it easier to influence a small number of legislators holding the reins of public policy. Election campaigns in America are longer and more expensive than in any other democracy. An Open Secrets analysis found that total spending in the 2020 election surpassed $14 billion, doubling the money spent in the 2016 election. Much of that money comes from wealthy patrons who wish to align public policy to their priorities and principles. Candidates are the messengers of the rich, conveying a message from the upper echelon of our society to the rest of us. That hypnotic message is your vote matters.

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Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash

Keywords: Electoral College, Constitution, vote

Gainotti, G. (2019). The role of the right hemisphere in emotional and behavioral disorders of patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration: An updated review. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2019.00055

Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E., & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PLoS ONE, 8(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071275

Steckler, C. M., Hamlin, J. K., Miller, M. B., King, D., & Kingstone, A. (2017). Moral judgement by the disconnected left and right cerebral hemispheres: A Split-Brain Investigation. Royal Society Open Science, 4(7), 170172. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170172. Available

Yergin, D., & Stanislaw, J. (1998). The commanding heights: The battle between government and the marketplace that is remaking the modern world. Simon & Schuster.