According to the studies of McCrae and Costa, there are five major traits at the root of personality known as the Big Five traits – Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional stability, and openness to new experiences. The Big Five personality traits have been used to predict many political outcomes such as ideological placement, vote choice, and candidate preference – they are even more telling than demographic factors. Conscientiousness and openness to experience are the two strongest predictors among these traits, with those high in conscientiousness favoring right-wing ideologies and those high in openness to experience favoring left-wing ideologies. So do the 2016 presidential candidate frontrunners correspond with these findings? I will attempt to identify their placement on this Big Five traits based on what I have seen of them thus far (with the opinions of a few others) – it is totally speculative.

GOP

Donald Trump – Trump is high in extraversion, low in agreeableness, low in conscientiousness, high in emotional stability, and probably high on openness.

Jeb Bush – Bush is low in extraversion, high in agreeableness, high in conscientiousness, high in emotional stability, and probably low on openness.

Ben Carson – Carson is low in extraversion, high in agreeableness, high in conscientioussness, high in emotional stability, and probably low on openness.

Carly Fiorina – Fiorina is high in extraversion, high in agreeableness, high in conscientiousness, high in emotional stability, and maybe high in openness.

Marco Rubio – Rubio is high in extroversion, high in agreeableness, high in conscientiousness, high in emotional stability, and probably high in openness.

Ted Cruz – Cruz is high in extraversion, low in agreeableness, high in conscientiousness, high in emotional stability, and perhaps open to new experiences.

Democrats

Hillary Clinton – Clinton is low in extraversion*, low in agreeableness, high in conscientiousness, high in emotional stability, and probably low in openness.

*One might wonder why I would list Clinton as low in extroversion. I mean, she’s running for President of the United States, no? Well, it’s my personal opinion that if she were left to her own devices, she would lean toward introversion. She has to have a big voice because she’s a high-level politician – her occupation requires it. This evaluation is also based on the fact that she is not particularly charismatic, like President Obama or her husband Former President Bill Clinton, for example.

Bernie Sanders – Sanders is high in extraversion, low in agreeableness, low in conscientiousness, high in emotional stability, high in openness.

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Emotional stability is the hardest trait to measure for the candidates because I don’t know them personally. Of course presidential candidates would mask any neuroticism they have if they have it, so Carly Fiorina could be totally crazy and we wouldn’t even know it when she’s talking about foreign policy. That being said, I’ve done my best to identify where the candidates might be placed on emotional stability. I just decided to leave all the candidates as high in emotional stability because politics is a tough, high-stress job and you need thick skin to be successful at it. I think this is reason enough.

All in all, it seems like most of the candidates have scored in line with McCrae and Costa’s findings – all the leading Republicans except Ben Carson are clearly extroverted and one of the two Democratic frontrunners scored high in openness to new experience. There will always be some deviants but most of the time, the Big Five traits do not fail to predict political outcomes. Find out if your personality matches your political ideology and leave it in the comments below!

If there’s one thing I am learning through my studies of political science here at LMU, it is that the ideology of the political landscape is always in flux. One such change that I find particularly baffling is the change of attitudes on socialism. The McCarthy era in the 1950s cast a long shadow over political science and over US politics in general. The deep suspicion instilled against poisoned everything it touched. Lives were ruined. Opportunities were lost. America was left with a deep suspicion of anything remotely connected to communism. One ideology that fell victim to the red scare was democratic socialism. This irrational fear toward socialism is why socialized medicine had to be rebranded “Medicare” and why certain people all around the US still profess to hate Obama. Given all these factors, I would never have predicted the rise of a certain Bernie Sanders.

Though Bernie Sanders has been in politics for many years, he has remained an outsider in Washington politics until very recently, and with good reason. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate I know of in the last 30 years who has been willing to openly declare himself a democratic socialist. Normally this would be a surefire way to political suicide. And yet somehow, his poll numbers are beginning to match those of the Democratic favorite, Hillary Rodham Clinton. All of this leads me to wonder, is Bernie Sanders causing a change in attitudes toward socialism or is he merely benefiting from an anti-corporate backlash? Regardless, new polls done by the pew research Center suggest that the influence of McCarthyism on American politics has finally at long last begun to wane.

I have been sitting on this article for quite some time, as I don’t really know what to make of it. On the one hand, the article cites the Cato institution as claiming that anticorporate sentiment in America is merely on the decline because of bad economic times. However, they go on to claim that a Americans essentially aren’t really subject to party ideology such as socialism. Respectfully, one wonders what planet they are living on. America may not be the most politically divided country in the world, but the stark dichotomy between the two parties magnifies whatever divisions exist. The only people in this country who are genuinely nonpartisan are independents. But there are numerous studies in America suggesting that many “independent voters” are that way precisely because they are apathetic towards political proceedings. This does not represent a portion of the population that is likely to vote.

American attitudes toward socialism have always struck me as strange. On the one hand, any government program labeled socialist in the United States is nearly always branded as evil. And yet, many of the governmental institutions which underpin this country’s safety and security are managed in accordance with socialist principles. Everybody pays into fire Department, Police Department, and (to a lesser degree) into the medical system. It is therefore strange to see staunch members of the tea party decrying government spending at the same time that they claim they want to keep Medicare (which, by the way is a limited form of socialized medicine). I have heard it said of American politics that we are politically conservative but operationally liberal. If that is true, it seems that even among the politically motivated, most Americans have a very poor understanding of the system which they support. The United States is obviously not a socialist country, but given how much we outwardly professed to hate socialism, why are we so reticent to admit its benefits? I begin to suspect the problem is not one of political ideology, but one of negative word association.

In a continuing theme, political psychology class has been focusing on how likely voters are to accept an idea they stop on repeated exposure to that idea. In a study done within the last 20 years, people who did not speak Chinese were shown a varying sample of Chinese characters. They were then asked to rate which ones they thought were more “pretty” in nearly all cases, the participants of the study chose characters which they had been shown more often than others. In other words, people began liking certain characters over others simply based on how often they were exposed to them throughout the study. I strongly suspect that during the Cold War, this process happened in reverse. People had little exposure to what socialism actually was. What little exposure they did have was in the context of the red scare. Lacking any other information, voters began to associate communism (and socialism as part of communism) with evil. Now it seems this process may be reversing once again due to a more positive exposure in recent years.

Beginning in earnest in 2008, many discussions have begun forcing Americans to examine how other countries deal with similar problems. As a semi-frequent consumer of the BBC News, I can attest to the fact that early Republican coverage of Obama’s healthcare reforms shocked the British to no end. The British have had nationalized healthcare since the end of World War II, and despite having some private insurance within the country, the vast majority of UK citizens are essentially happy with the British national health service. No, that does not make them communist. In a new generation that is not infected by the scourge of the red scare, socialism might be starting to mean something more positive again. Rather than dreaded images of McCarthy and the House of un-American activities committee, young people are increasingly associating socialism with things like improved domestic services and healthcare. Some, like the Cato Institute might claim that this is a passing fad however I don’t believe this is the case. It is undeniable now that several countries in Western Europe have managed to create successful socialist capitalist hybrid governments. I believe it is their success, not “a passing fad” which is bolstering Bernie Sanders poll numbers. Does this mean we will become Europe overnight? Probably not. But thanks to their positive example we may finally begin to put the ghost of the red scare to bed once and for all.

Horray, another post about Tuesday’s Democratic Presidential debates.  As per usual, I offer up some rhetorical analysis, and some connections of this week’s readings/lectures to Tuesday’s Presidential debate.

To start off, the candidates Tuesday’s Democratic debates all represented different personalities and alignments within the Left and Left-of-center communities.  Bernie Sanders was somewhat of a youthful college type, railing against corporations and economic and social inequality.  Martin O’Malley represented the Clinton h8rs.  Jimm Webb and Lincoln Chafee represented the, generally, older and more on-the-fence moderate Democrats.  Obviously, this all constitutes more of a variety of characters than the GOP debates, most of the candidates of which represented those on the more-pronounced Right.  One overriding statement to be derived from this week’s reading (and because Its common knowledge) is that a candidate’s “relatability” is important, specifically the importance of the candidate’s ability to make their platform understandable (pg 25).  Indeed, the candidates from this week who received the highest regards were those who answered definitively and concisely.  –“Mr. Sanders, do Black Lives Matter?” –“Yes, Black Lives Matter.”  It follows that the candidates who received the lowest regards, Webb and Chafey, were those who did not answer complex, and sensitive, questions directly.  Clinton was criticized for this in some instances as well.

Secondly, this Presidential election cycle has hosted some discourses not fully present in the previous election season.  Two amongst these are accountability of government officials (like the 5-0) and the discriminatory nature of voter ID laws.  The reading this week notes (and I paraphrase): Part of being able to relate to and trust a leader is knowing that they are accountable, and participation in the democratic process is knowing that you have the means to do your “civic duties” (the latter of which is found on pg. 11).  It would follow that whether you vote or not is far from irrational; it depends on whether you think it’ll serve your purpose.  I think that the candidates who represent grassroots issues the most will ultimately be nominated for their parties, especially amongst the Democrats.

Thirdly, people have noted that the last few elections have been more and more politically polarized.  This certainly has manifested itself in Congress.  But hey, look on the bright side; at least America has distinctions in its dichotomous political alignment system.  In some countries, you can’t tell the difference.  I was pleased to see that this week’s excerpt from the handbook cited the former Communist and Socialist states (USSR, Warsaw, China, Jugoslavija) as examples of countries where there is little distinction amongst so-called “Progressives” and “Radicals” or “Conservatives”  (pg 15).  In former Yugoslavia, which I bloviate about soooo much, the Serbian Progressive Party’s Tomislav Nikolic holds the Presidency of Serbia.  Prior to his presidency, his political platform was radically different–he was a war crimes denier, journalist assassination advocate, blah blah blah.  In various South and Central American democratic bids, failed parties would just rebrand themselves, change their insignias and platform and then run again in the next elections.

Finally, I have a criticism of one of this week’s chapter’s conclusions, that “levels of need for security are most often found in conservative ideologies” (pg 18).  The concern for security is totally incidental, and obviously not correlatable to political alignments alone. Everybody has their own security concerns at any given time.  Indeed, one of the issues that dominated the democratic debate was police brutality aimed disproportionately against non-White populations; pretty socially liberal issue, there.

We all experience that 2:00 pm feeling. 2:00 in the afternoon is that time of the day when you feel like you’ve exerted your maximum amount of productivity for the day, your maximum amount of mental energy. Even if it’s not actually 2:00 pm, this feeling can occur anytime after a long period of work. Sure, you do feel physically tired like you’d rather be lying down on the couch, or just sitting anywhere else but a desk. But even more than that you feel like your “brain is tired.” It’s not really a headache, but you know that you don’t want to be doing anything that requires effortful thinking. I’m actually feeling this way right now at 3:25 pm and it’s my day off of classes! Is there any science behind this feeling? Is it just you, or just me?

Well, this week I’ve learned that it’s actually a legitimate feeling. It’s the result of System 1 and System 2 operations of the brain. System 1 is effortless, effective, and automatic – it is intuition; System 2 is effortful, rule-based, and slow – it is reasoning. Turns out that System 2 is a lazy bum and it functions only when it needs to, like when you’re writing a paper or having a heavy, intellectual conversation. Our brains function on a combination of System 1 and System 2, but leans toward System 1 because System 2 takes suggestions from System 1. The best example of this I can think of for myself is when I’m shopping (and I’m super indecisive) and I pull a top from the rack, and my gut instinct is that I like it, but I spend 2 minutes staring at it trying to evaluate just how much I like it – is it worth trying on? Well, I immediately had a positive reaction to it so I might as well. And repeat. But even though System 2 takes these suggestions from System 1, System 2 still gets fatigued pretty easily, and even though I was only shopping for two hours I feel like I need to binge-watch TV for another four hours to recoop.

I don’t really have an answer to this so I probably shouldn’t raise it, but what makes some people more impulsive and others more indecisive, like myself? Do impulsive people operate more on System 1 just because, or is their System 2 even lazier than it normally would be? Is my indecisiveness not caused by my System 2’s above-average endurance but rather lacking intuition? Help me, Professor Gutting!

This week I also learned that brain food is a real thing. It’s not just a weird idiom that teachers and old people say. The brain runs on glucose (aka sugar), so whenever you consume sugar you’re really helping out your brain! Unfortunately psychologists wouldn’t recommend eating cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but next time you get that 2:00 pm feeling I talked about earlier, just eat a banana.

This week I will just share some real-life observations that I can connect the reading too.  Our week 6 reading contained a number of models and explanations that I thought I was alone in noticing, or at least observations that I have had a hard time turning into words.

First is the Kahneman Chapter 1 reading, section entitled “Plot Synopsis”.  It is about how we become alert when surprised or confronted with things we do not know.  An example that I witness a lot is when somebody who is a tired, groggy state, unwilling to drive or walk around.  Suddenly, in their comfort zone, something comes by that affects their well-being or security. Maybe a fight occurred at the party this person was at.  Suddenly, this person can, whether it is consciously or unconsciously, suspend their tiredness for the sake of survival.

Second is Chapter 2 of Lodge and Taber, roughly midway through (the section that it falls under is unclear).  The point being made is that people routinely rationalize things that they do not know how to deal with.  An example that we all see is when somebody goes on the offensive because of some indignation committed against them, e.g. an insult or a strike.  Of course, provided the scene is tranquil and the person is in a relaxed state, they are surprised by this indignation.  For reasons partially explained above, they become alert, and begin to process some kind of two-system opinion about the incident.  AFTER THE FACT, they continue thinking about it, almost as if they were traumatized.  Their dialogue, their spoken thought process, indicate that they are very sure of themselves, and yet they continue bloviating about how out of line the aggressor was.  “What the hell was that person’s problem?  They were out of line.  I can’t believe they did that to me! You know what it is, their mama probably dropped them one-too-many times.  Or maybe he is messed up mentally.  All I can say is that in the future that fella is going to get their ass seriously kicked!”  This dialogue illustrates a person who has formed an opinion and is content in their place, but still need to fill in the empty spaces of curiosity.  You can always tell that despite their spoken confidence, that they are on the defensive.

Third and last, is a point made about idealistic judgements, covered on page 17.  A study showed that graduates of West-Point with certain Romanesue facial features (chiseled jaw, prominent forehead, high cheekbones, etc) are more likely to be promoted to higher ranks than those who did not possess these phenotypes.  Something I learned recently about Abe Lincoln really surprised me, and the phenomenon noted on page 17 of Lodge/Taber explains why.  When you look at Abe’s portrait, what do you envision?  A galant U.S. President with a commanding, baritone voice, like a narrator.  As it turns out, many of his contemporaries passed down the knowledge that Lincoln’s voice was quite shrill and treble-dominant, making it difficult for him to project his voice.  Suddenly, the entire corpus of assumptions that I had about Lincoln’s demeanor changed.

Every now and then, something happens in life which causes a sea change in political views. For me that moment came in the year of 2008. Barack Obama was about to be elected president. Hopes were high, and it was a good time to reach the voting age (I had just turned 18). To me, Obama was a shoe in. After Hillary Clinton dropped out of that race, nothing could stop Obama, or so I thought. And then for the first time, I began to see what contemporary American racism looked like.

I have spent my entire life in the bedroom community of Torrance. It is quiet, respectable, and admittedly mostly white. As far as I knew, nobody with whom I had any close association was overtly racist. I always assumed that racism would be met with a cold shoulder. In such an environment, it is easy to be lulled into the comforting idea that the footage of the Ku Klux Klan rallies I had seen in history class and the occasional police incident on the evening news were relics of a bygone era, anachronisms that like most of the people who practiced them, were simply waiting around to die. Racism was on the retreat. Ooh rah for pluralist post-racial American society. But several news stories about Barack Obama began surfacing that would rudely awaken me from this pleasant dream. There were some states, it turns out, in which Barack Obama just couldn’t gain majority votes. Why was this? Did people not like his policy? Did his speaking style come across as “too elitist”? Did he not know the issues? No, as it turns out, the problem for these voters, according to NPR, was that he was black. The story itself has long since been buried under a mountain of op-eds by NPR journalists on the subject, and 20 frustrating minutes of googling failed to unearth it. Suffice it to say that though the rest of America may have been blissfully ignorant of this problem, many of Obama’s foot soldiers during the campaign were not. The story was about ways in which Obama’s campaign staff tried not to get worn down by people who still held out of date racist views. Needless to say that story would change my outlook forever, because a lot of the people mentioned in the story were not old white curmudgeons, but college aged teenagers. In my view, anyone born post-1960 who wasn’t a member of a hate group shouldn’t hold these opinions. But apparently many people did then, and do now. In spades. But I had a couple of saving graces left to cling to. This story was told across state lines. Other states might be racist, I thought, but here in good old progressive California, we knew better. And so with some restless fidgeting, I was able to dream on. But all pleasant dreams must end.

The next stage of my awakening happened last year, when I was required to take a race relations course as a core requirement for graduation. I was resentful at first, believing that even though racism was historically proven, I could still point to my home as being a clean paragon of virtue, at least in the modern day. The class, it turned out, was life-changing. Not only did I begin to realize the full extent of how bad things were even in California, it finally started to sink in that some fairly egregious abuses of human rights had taken place within a whisker of my own lifetime Suddenly I began interpreting those evening news stories I had been hearing for several years in a new light. Could it possibly be that this country was (and is) still virulently racist? But amidst my crumbling fortress of certainty I had one fortification I to which I could still cling. I reasoned that the rise of organizations like the NAACP meant that while social racism was still alive and well, institutional racism as it was practiced in political theory and law still had met its end in the 1960s. After all, who would have believed in the 1960s that a black man could become president? I had, of course red about continuing claims of institutional racism within the United States, but I frankly doubted their existence on the grounds that, at least in theory, these things were supposed to be illegal. Furthermore, I knew I wasn’t racist. I knew my family wasn’t racist. I knew my friends weren’t racist (at least as far as I could tell). In short though I knew racism existed I had never seen it with my own eyes, or so I thought.

It is not often that I get a chance to talk about political theory. The intricacies and vagaries of political theory on this subject could take up an entire blog post unto themselves. Suffice it to say that race is becoming (or has become) a hot topic. Charles W Mills is the most famous among a set of “racial contract theorists”. In his book “the racial contract” Mills draws on historical evidence and some more recent instances of case law to argue not only that our political theories were founded specifically with racism in mind, but also that racism forms a sort of hidden barrier which only nonwhites can see. White people in other words are so accustomed to living in a world dominated by white supremacy that (according to him) they literally literally fail to recognize it, even when it is staring them in the face. I was initially skeptical of this claim, but as I read, I began to wonder: could it be true?

Several studies in political psychology point to the fact that people often don’t reason out the political decisions they make in ways that appear “rational” on the surface. The reason for this supposedly erratic decision-making is the inability of the human brain to consciously processed everything it sees. As a result, we end up relying on heuristic shortcuts. This is why I believe Mills theory may have some truth to it. Though I think there are some logical problems with arguing that white people are by definition unaware of their privilege, it is entirely possible that we process a great deal of how we think about minorities below the surface. Trevor Noah sometimes eludes to this effect on his new post at the daily show.

 

But if this worldview is correct how are we to know whether we are guilty of things like racism? Is our idea that we are free of racism based completely on the fact that we understand this intellectually to be true, or is it based on a subconscious unwillingness to “face the facts”? It is entirely possible that many white people have a subconscious racism. But if that is true, what becomes of free will? Nobody I know would wish to be judged based on subconscious cultural programming. Is it enough to claim that you are not racist if it is done with conscious sincerity?

If you don’t believe Mills premise about cultural programming, consider this: consider the words “mugger” and “thug”. What is the race of the person that comes to mind when you invoke those words? If you answered black, many would say that this is racist, because those subconscious opinions color the way you treat black people by default.

Ultimately, I don’t think there is a cure for this, save for time.

Motivated reasoning occurs when people shape their beliefs about the world to make them consistent with their preferences rather than form their preferences in accordance with an objective assessment of the world. This is one of those things you don’t really think about, but when you hear it in your Political Psychology class, you’re like, “Wow. That is SO true.” We are all  guilty of motivated reasoning. If none of us were, would we all have the same preferences and ideological views? Would there even be two ever-polarizing political parties in this country with dozens of parties in between or would we all hold hands and get along?

I’m sure there are some deeply intellectual, mechanical people out there who overcome this bias because they’re aware of the phenomenon, but I am also sure that most of us would have trouble overcoming this bias even if we were aware of it. How can a human think objectively about the world when humans are such emotional, instinct-driven creatures, like animals? Yes, we technically operate on both System 1 (intuition) and System 2 (reasoning) functions but it’s not equally distributed – mostly it’s System 1. In the Kahneman reading for this week, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” he explains why errors of intuitive thought are difficult to prevent – it’s because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will. He continues, “Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are available, errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2” (28). So, my question is answered. We can overcome motivated reasoning, it’s just hard and impractical.

It is significantly easier to identify other people’s mistakes in thinking rather than our own. This must be why political debates are even a thing and why they’re so entertaining to watch. Each candidate is convinced that they’re right; they get so infuriated over the fact that the opposing candidate does not see how incorrect they are, while the other candidate feels the exact same way. Even us as viewers adopt this behavior. Liberals watching the GOP debates furiously live tweeted and facepalmed in front of their TVs and conservatives will do the same during the Democrats’ debate later this month. Members of both parties have vastly different views on the same issues because none of us assess the world objectively – we’re too emotionally invested. Maybe the apathetic ones have all the answers.

This week we examined decision-making from the standpoint of Dennis Chong, a rationalist, and Dennis Brader, who lays down the essence of affectivist arguments.  I tend to sway towards the views espoused by the latter author.  I am also convinced from experience, that people’s underlying emotional affects guide their decisions in ways they cannot always detect (perhaps sub-conscious is not the word, but anyhow…) ;  my agreement is not only out of my agreement with Brader’s school of thought, but also because of some scenarios that Chong left out that I think are worth considering.

In essence, rational choice can be alternately described as the condition of being perfectly-adept and able to exercise free will at one’s accord.  On this issue, Chong mostly talks about voting, and Brader mostly talks about how emotions play out in advertising.  Chong advances (or at least endorses, or conveys for educational purposes) the idea one acts in their best interest to maximize gains.  However, there are instances where people undoubtedly are aware of increased utility (not only for themselves, but for others, too) and are PHYSICALLY ABLE to act otherwise, but don’t.  Here are some scenarios to consider.

A salient example is “no-snitching”.  I see this amongst my friends who moved into South Central or the SFV (having originally lived in my part of town and then changed their sensibilities once they moved), where if they witness a criminal act, they do not cooperate with police.  Sometimes people on the block talk about it amongst themselves, but not always.  While they are completely able to do otherwise (as it’s in their physical ability to, say, pick up a phone and dial 9-11) and even though there may be benefit for themselves and their whole community (e.g.  if the crook were to be caught!!), the witnesses in this case are conditioned not to cooperate with cops because of distrust.

Another thing to consider are routines made from and consisting of unhealthy habits.  If your friend from Koreatown calls you on stressful Wednesday nights, and you have the willpower to drive from LMU to Koreatown (a 15, 20 minute deal) a few times, then there is reason to believe you can do it in the future.  However, one night (a Wednesday night as is typical) you tell them you can’t make it, and don’t go.  You feel odd.  You are doing something against your Wednesday night routine.  There is something in your gut that is pushing you toward the Drollinger lot, but youre still studying in your dorm.  This unfamiliarity makes you uncomfortable, at the very least.  You may end up giving into these feelings, and on the way there think: “why am I going against my work ethic?” Because, you made a routine out of it.

Psychological conditioning plays out too. A person who feels the need to administer drugs to bear through the perceived dullness of even the tiniest duties eventually finds themselves conditioned to a reality where they always have that perceived nice buzz.  If you start taking large doses of…any drug…for every tiny event, everything seems special, so, relatively speaking, nothing is special.  Furthermore, sudden cessation causes a frustrating unfamiliarity with a non-buzzed world.

According to NBC News, the top candidates for the 2016 election have collectively spent millions of dollars on TV ads already. Groups supporting Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is only polling in the single digits, have spent $3.7 million on ads (all for New Hampshire!) as of the beginning of September. And yet, the facts show that TV ads have a very slight effect on how Americans vote on Election Day. So why do campaigns spend so much of their campaign funds on these ads? It makes sense that the candidates would focus their ads in important electoral states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, etc. because those states are politically competitive. Here in California, and in this election cycle, I only recall ever seeing ads endorsing Marco Rubio. We don’t get ads shoved down our throats here because it’s evident that we’re going to go blue; Republicans candidates put in a fraction of the effort campaigning here as they do in any of the aforementioned states. But… there is still hope that their ads will help them gain name recognition among average, uninformed Americans, and eventually, their vote.

Even in the age of the Internet, TV is the media platform that reaches the most people – 87% of Americans over 18, in fact. You don’t need to make an effort to read the newspaper or search the web to find current events or the latest election headlines. You can watch your favorite TV show – totally avoiding news channels – and have a political ad play during the commercial break. This is how the apathetic Americans are exposed to politics without even trying.

TV ads can benefit all candidates, but especially the challengers to incumbents and lesser-known for getting their name out there. In a 2010 study, Michael Franz and Travis Ridout found that advertising had a big effect on voting in 2008, but only if you had a lot of ads. “Having a 1,000-ad advantage across the entire campaign, for instance, resulted in about a 0.5 percentage point improvement in a candidate’s share of the vote in 2008,” they found. But this change likely came from voters who were always undecided; we know that Americans aren’t very “gullible” or easily swayed from one side of the aisle to another. As Brader noted in our reading for this week, “…campaigns do matter, but only to help voters reach the decision clever modelers knew, well in advance, they would reach” (110).

Another reason why ads are effective, but not that effective, is that people nowadays can switch the channel in a second from where they’re sitting. Or they just mute the TV or scroll through social media. So maybe TV ads are more effective for people over 40, who are more inclined to just sit through commercials until their show comes back on.

We can talk about fear ads, feel-good ads, and unimpassioned ads, and which ones are more effective for days. However, the truth is that TV is dying and the Internet is growing rapidly. Campaigns better start turning their attention toward digital advertising and find a way to make compelling, entertaining ads online that people will actually see. Chances are strategists have already started thinking about it. What do you think campaign advertising online should, or will, look like?

Sources:

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/ben-carson-isnt-spending-much-tv-ads-n420486

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/19/432759311/2016-campaign-tv-ad-spending