Seventy-eight million Americans are key to the USA’s post-2024 election. But reaching these non-voters from 2020 requires a different understanding of how elections really work.
Over the course of about 10 Medium articles, I have tried to educate political writers on Medium on the nature of election campaigns. I have not been successful. Too many people still believe that campaigns are about “vote switching” — one side trying to convince voters from the other side to change their minds or position. While there is some vote switching happening, campaigns have much bigger objectives to fulfill — to win elections.
It’s not hard to understand why the masses believe in vote switching. The mass media facilitates the myth. CNN sure likes to parade a former MAGA member who changed his mind, as if this is a common occurrence. But these conversions do not happen enough to make a big difference.
I get little hints from the talking heads on the TV talking head programs that some of them kind of understand “getting out the vote.” But they will not take the true nature of election campaigns to the level that this article is going to go. Be forewarned some of you are going to hear a few novel things about democratic elections in the rest of this essay. Here goes.
Hard vs. Soft
There are two kinds of voters: hard support and soft support.
Hard support voters are very motivated to cast a vote. They will walk through blizzards and miss their mother’s funeral to make their vote count. Political parties can depend on their hard support to vote.
Soft support voters are not so committed. They have a definite preference as to who should be elected. But the effort to cast a vote is not as strong.
Soft supporters are why political parties send volunteers, called “canvassers,” to your house during election season. In your brief encounter with the canvasser, he/she is making a quick determination if you are a supporter or not. If you are, the canvasser will make a note of your address. The canvasser or the campaign office may be able to extract other contact information. As the campaign moves forward, you might be getting phone calls, texts, and mail from the party.
This is all designed to encourage you — if you are a soft supporter — to make the effort to vote. If you get enough encouragement, you are more likely to make the trip to the polls and cast for your preference. Canvassing is about identifying and encouraging the soft support, not about vote-switching.
The political party also goes after the soft support of the opposing political party. The technique is negative political advertising. Negative ads are not about vote switching either. Rather the ads put a negative image in the soft supporter’s mind that their preference is not really worth the effort to cast a vote towards. So when it gets time to vote, excuses can be found: “My one vote does not count that much,” or “I had a hard day at work,” or “My son has a basketball game tonight.”
This does not mean the soft supporter has gone to the other side. Rather the soft supporter is dissuaded to vote his or her preference. A vote not cast for Side A is almost as good as a vote cast for Side B.
It sounds ironic that many political commentators encourage people to vote, yet there are systemic forces to discourage people from voting. Or maybe better said: discourage people from the other side from voting.
So, the battleground in elections is in the minds of the soft supporters — get our soft supporters to vote; discourage their soft supporters not to vote. Therefore, during the campaign, there will be many campaign messages with the soft supporters being the main target. The cumulative effect on all these positive and negative messages will decide whether soft supporters make the trip to the voting booth — or not.
The hard support is not affected by all the propaganda.
Political junkies seem not to believe in soft support. They believe everyone wears their politics with the same intensity as hard supporters, including the other side (who are obviously so wrong). In the junkies’ minds, those who don’t vote are just apathetic or ignorant or lazy or some other negative adjective.
But the reality is that soft supporters are a much bigger demographic than voters who could switch their vote. The people who manage campaigns understand how important soft supporters are to electoral success. Soft supporters are the primary objective in campaigns. Not the hard support. Not the vote switchers.
If you are still not convinced of the hard vs. soft support, tell me why political parties use canvassers and negative ads if all voters were motivated enough to walk through blizzards and miss their mother’s funeral?
The Presidential Race 2016
As I was watching the Republican primary in 2016, it seemed to me that the left-leaning media was doing all it could to get Mr. Trump as the Republican nominee. He got far more airtime than the more even-keeled, more experienced, and more articulate John Kasich.
I imagined the conversations in the back rooms of left-wing political power. With Mr. Trump as the nominee, these influencers thought there was no way the Democrat nominee could lose. So giving Mr. Trump and his drama extra attention sounded like good political strategy. And this strategy helped advertising revenues for all media outlets: John Kasich was not so profitable. So the media, too, played the Trump Show. We were so entertained.
Hindsight says this was not a good long-term, left-wing strategy for the USA. But this is where we are at today.
Let’s get back to soft support
My apologies for digressing. I needed to bring back the 2016 campaign to make some points about soft support.
· I believe that Mr. Comey’s claim of Clinton’s email mismanagement caused 500,000 soft D supporters not to vote. It does not matter if this claim was true, half-true, or not true. Soft support was lost.
· I believe the activity of the Russian internet trolls caused 500,000 soft D supporters not to vote.
· I believe the absolutely brilliant Trump Facebook campaign caused 500,000 soft D supporters not to vote.
Hard supporters were not affected by any of these events.
Most soft supporters were not affected by these events.
But 500,000, soft-D voters decided not to make a trip to polls on November 8, 2016. Five hundred thousand votes “not cast” sounds not very important. After all, they are only 0.3% of the eligible voters.
In a coin-flip election with 48 winner-take-all elections, that 0.3% had a big effect on the final result. My hypothesis is that if one of these actions had not happened, the result would have Ms. Clinton’s Electoral College votes a lot closer to the magical 270 needed to win. Two of these events not happening would have put her over the 270. When two contenders are so equal, the silliest of things can determine the winner and loser.
Some readers will claim that I really can’t prove my hypothesis. And they are right. We will not re-run this election, changing a few variables, to prove if I am right or wrong.
A close election is like a close football game, with a few crucial plays that decides which team wins. The game went through maybe 100 ordinary plays to find those crucial plays, with both teams being careful while looking for an opening. Both teams were credible competitors. If they played another game a week later, the losing team could be the winner.
While we armchair quarterbacks can call the plays that should have been called, we don’t replay the game just to make sure we got the right winner.
Similarly, we like to political armchair our democratic elections. We are so much smarter than the people actually running the campaigns. Right?
Just like we won’t be hired to coach professional football teams, we won’t be hired to run political campaigns. The actual campaign managers will continue to design campaigns to target the soft support — because managing soft support is where close elections are won or lost. There is just too much experience to abandon these known strategies. And campaigns are not about vote switching. Not even the issues. If a political party cannot get its soft support to the polls, it loses.
And we will never know the full psychology of soft support voters. Why do some go to the voting booth and others do not? This decision is often a culmination of several actions coming together at the right time. And each soft supporter is affected differently by the same stimulus. So much psychology these election campaigns are.
But when a political campaign embarks on a certain campaign activity, that activity is designed to play with the mind of the soft supporters: encourage our side to vote and discourage the other side not to vote. The managers of political campaigns know this very well and play a numbers game, even if many pundits believe soft support is not important.
Published on Medium 2024
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