The goal of any viable political candidate seeks to win over as many individual voters as is humanly possible through the magic combination of charisma, articulate policy plans, and the right positions on issues that matter to the electorate. But why and how does an individual decide to align themselves with a given political candidate? While Obama won the popular vote in the 2008 presidential election by a considerable margin of about one million votes, Republican Senator John McCain earned himself a hefty 59,948,323 votes.[1] They employed every and all available tools and methods for swinging voters one way or another, but applying psychological theories and norms surrounding decision-making to voters yields evidence that specific information matters less and less to the voters compared to the intangible facets of a candidate.
The 2008 election was unique in that the American electorate elected the first African American president—a young Senator with a charismatic preacher’s voice and progressive policy plans who beat out an esteemed war veteran that represented the type of Republicanism the Republican party aspired to: principled and honest. In several ways, Obama and McCain, respectively, represented their party’s ideal politician in the ways in which they both actively stood for the values on each’s platform. With such hopeful and genuine representations of each party, voters’ value-based and emotionally driven evaluations prevailed as the primary psychological method for selecting a candidate. As such, heuristic voting and biological responses to politics increased partisan polarization by solidifying the distinction between Republican and Democratic voters in the psychology of their decision-making.
Heuristic voting or the cognitive simplification of political consumption provides voters with an easy way to boil down the heaps of information presented to them throughout the growth of their political consciousness and specifically did so throughout the campaigns of the 2008 presidential election.[2] As Sharon Begley says in “When It’s Head Versus Heart, the Heart Wins”, “Voters know nothing. Or next to nothing”, citing anxiety and enthusiasm as the leading emotional determinants of voters’ decision-making coupled with gut rationality aiding them in selecting a candidate. GOP consultant Frank Luntz says, “More important than what people think is how they feel”, where voters evaluate positions on the basis of their response to a particular candidate using their feeling not a calculation. In particular, voters are drawn to the combination of fear, hope, and pride—a set of emotions representative of the desire for security and inspiration and the wish for comfort with a candidate.[3]
[1] US Federal Election Commission, FEDERAL ELECTIONS 2008 Election Results for the U.S. President, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, 7, July 2009, accessed November 10, 2019, https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2008/federalelections2008.pdf. [2] Patrizia Catellani, "Political Psychology Overview," in Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology, ed. Charles Donald Spielberger (Elsevier Science & Technology, 2004), accessed October 31, 2019, https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/estappliedpsyc/political_psychology_overview/0. [3] Sharon Begley, "When It's Head Versus Heart, the Heart Wins," Newsweek 151, no. 06 (February 11, 2008).