Release date: July 13, 2004

It's the Emotion, Stupid

By Drew Westen*
dwesten@emory.edu
404-727-7407

If the combination of plummeting poll numbers for the president without a corresponding rise in support for John Kerry seems paradoxical, it is because the Kerry campaign has failed to appreciate what should be their motto: It's the emotion, stupid.

Survey research from the last 20 years suggests that most voters, unlike the political junkies glued to their televisions on Sunday mornings, pay little attention to politics and are unaware of where the candidates stand on most issues. Just as casual beer drinkers are more likely than ale aficionados to be influenced by ads depicting (usually good-looking) people enjoying themselves at a bar, those who casually sip the nectar of politics every four years without strong commitments to one brand or another are more likely to respond to emotional appeals than to policy statements. The voters who matter most in this election—swing voters—tend to vote with their guts. And while their guts are turning against George Bush, they are not turning toward John Kerry.

Al Gore lost the election in 2000 despite a wellspring of positive feeling toward what he and Bill Clinton had accomplished—a booming economy, a budget surplus, the lowest unemployment rate in years, a massive decline in the welfare roles—because he could not marshal good feeling toward him. Gore just seemed unlikable to the average voter. Kerry's problem is not that he seems unlikable. It's that he doesn't engender strong feelings of liking.

If strong negatives are the kiss of death for a politician, weak positives mean that the candidate never gets kissed. The Kerry campaign got a strong start during the primary season through emotionally powerful criticism of Bush, but it has been unable to read the emotion of the public or to tailor a message that arouses any passion. As a result, Kerry is receiving minimal airtime in the midst of an extraordinarily bad stretch for the president, and when he does receive it, his message does not seem to make anyone's heart flutter.

Kerry's recent advertising campaign is emblematic of a failure at the highest levels of his campaign to appreciate how to read the feelings of the electorate. That a team of experienced consultants could put together a television ad calling voters' attention to Kerry's Yale pedigree boggles the mind. If the election of George Bush should have taught the Democrats anything, it is that Americans do not like intellectuals. Or consider, in the same ad, when Kerry talks about his optimism about America's future. The content is right—people want to believe in a better future--but his face is impassive: no smile, no twinkle, nothing to engender feelings of excitement, national pride or hope. This should have been obvious to the naked eye of anyone advising a campaign. It may not be Political Science 101, but it is Psychology 101.

The role of the gut in electing presidents is something Republicans have long understood. Show gay people getting married—and focus the camera on the kiss at the end of the ceremony—and white males will flock to the voting booth. Describe the president as a war president, and keep people focused on their patriotism or fear.

Appealing to emotions does not require appealing to people's baser instincts. There is plenty of footage from Iraq to fill a 30-second spot. And it takes little emotional imagination to picture footage of candidate Bush with his biggest campaign contributor, Ken Lay, juxtaposed with his promise to "run the government like a CEO runs a company." Psychologically, we readily connect emotions with images, compelling stories, and tone of voice. It is much harder to associate a strong feeling with an abstraction or statistic.

The inability of the Kerry campaign to find its emotional compass—to know when and how to attack, when and how to deliver a positive message, and when to lay back and let the president choke on his own pretzels—reflects a systemic problem within the Democratic party, readily apparent in early primary endorsements for the emotionally unelectable Howard Dean. It is no accident that Bill Clinton, who understood emotion as well as any politician in modern American history, is the only Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to have been elected to a second term.

Kerry's meteoric rise in the Democratic primaries, and the emotion in his voice as he delivered campaign speeches at that time, suggest that he is capable of rousing passions as well as intellects. But it will take a fundamental reorientation of his campaign—and a very different understanding of what makes swing voters swing—to get him to the White House.

The selection of John Edwards may signal an important shift in the Kerry campaign. The serious consideration given to Dick Gephardt, who could not excite passion among even the Democratic base and whose emotional appeal is comparable to that of the Pillsbury Doughboy, was an ominous sign. But the selection of Edwards suggests that Kerry understood the value of a running mate whose interpersonal ease and comfort register immediately upon watching him, even with the sound turned off. Although running mates rarely swing elections, the choice of Edwards may suggest that the Kerry team is getting a better sense of the emotional factors that make swing voters swing.

* Drew Westen is director of clinical psychology and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta.

Back