The Art of Buying Your Vote
by R. Anthony Arnold
February 2024
For weeks now, there’s been an unusually high amount of hand-wringing by economists and Democrat politicians. The people think the economy stinks and President Biden is to blame. And a lot of them believe these facts warrant giving former President Trump a second term.
The economists are stressed because they keep insisting that the economy is doing pretty well. They're shocked, and maybe even annoyed, that there’s this gap between “how things are” and “how people think things are.” They seem to have only recently discovered that voters sometimes get “irrationally” angry about stuff.
For the politicians, the news is worse. The Biden administration has spent months attempting to make “Bidenomics” a thing. And while there’s fun to be had at their expense, it's mostly very sad to see.
It also represents a disheartening sign for Biden. Rational or not, people really are angry about the economy, and they’re going to hold him responsible. The administration’s attempts to deploy clever messaging didn’t work, so barring some dramatic shifts, this headwind will persist through the election season.
There are lessons to be learned here. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone is going to internalize the one I wish they would: Stop campaigning on the economy!
I’m no idiot. I know this won’t happen; but that won’t stop me from wishing. As I've said before, people running for President need to be honest with voters about what they can and can’t do.
Biden is promising that, “We’re going to end fossil fuel.” Not possible.
Trump is insisting that, ‘Mexico is going to pay for the wall.’ No chance.
But despite the common deployment of lies as a campaign strategy, politicians rarely suffer any consequences. The American public is, all things considered, less unhinged and furious then they ought to be, given the decades of broken promises. Why is that the case? Might it be that voters have simply come to expect most political statements to be full of lies?
Every four years, Americans are treated to another round of meaningless promises, made by people who are well aware they can’t possibly deliver on them, on topics of profound importance. Is it really “irrational” to be angry under circumstances like these? Can anyone blame us for feeling cynical?
Will this stop Biden and whoever Republicans choose (most likely Trump) from repeating the same mistake next time? No, it won’t. That's because it's not a mistake at all. Our political system doesn't simply not punish lies, it rewards them. The act of winning votes is now largely an exercise in branding; and promises of ever increasing prosperity are simply a part of those brands.
In 2008, I was still a young man. One who was eager to vote for Barack Obama. He was young, fresh, inspiring, eloquent, and seemed like a pretty good guy to hang out with. It didn’t hurt that in his own biracial identity, and public speaking about race, I saw much of myself, given my own background and emotions as a biracial man. I wasn’t a convert or an acolyte, but I was genuinely excited.
His campaign that year was flawless. I joke now that the so-called “Obama coalition,” which was supposed to deliver Democrats a stranglehold on national politics, wasn’t the “Obama coalition.” It was Obama’s Coalition.
That coalition was the result of that campaign. At a time when we’ve become used to politicians who are less than inspiring, or maybe not so graceful on the trail, Obama in the spring and summer of 2008 stands in stark contrast. Every speech of his was powerful. The words flowed out of him with this combination of grace and style.
No event better highlights this than his speech in March of that year following the controversy surrounding Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor in Chicago. When that story broke, many of us thought he was sunk. That the “race question,” which stalked him from the outset, had finally ensnared him.
It hadn’t. With one speech, ambitiously titled “A More Perfect Union,” he not only answered the question, he slammed the door in its face. In doing so, he paved his way to winning the Presidency. He had taken the thorniest topic in American politics, and turned it from a damning controversy into a platform to demonstrate his strength.
So, why so much talking about a campaign from 15 years ago? Because it kicked off so much that’s now wrong with our politics.
In October of 2008 Obama received the award for Marketer of the Year, the first time a politician had done so. And because we were all basking in the warm glow of his light, I think the oddness and implications of the award were largely lost on those who were charged with monitoring such things, people in the media, the watchdogs, the thinkers and commentators.
I suspect they, too, had been won over by the power of his brand, and were unable to escape his gravitational pull. So, it went mostly unexamined; but the implications of a President who is renowned and revered for his excellence in marketing and brand building are actually disturbing.
Brands invest considerable resources into studying us. In fact, there’s a peer reviewed scientific journal titled Psychology & Marketing, which is dedicated to the “application of psychological theories and techniques to marketing.” We, when performing mundane tasks such as buying detergent, or serious ones such as doing our civic duty, are being analyzed. Our patterns, our habits, and our behaviors are being scrutinized and observed, so that well-paid and intelligent people can figure out how to make us do more of the things they want us to do.
Jeff Hammerbacher, former rising star in Facebook, summed it up well when he said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” He was right, of course, but even he hadn’t quite conceived of how that reality would mesh with the fact that presidential campaigns had become exercises in brand building. That’s the world we live in, now.
So, exactly how much choice do I have in the matter? If the purpose of advertising and marketing is to make my actions almost robotic, in order to produce ever more stable and growing bottom lines, then am I really choosing? Where does my mind end, and the brand’s wishes begin?
How much does our vote belong to us? How much of it is shaped by factors like marketing and branding? How many resources do our parties devote to winning us over before the official campaign has even started?
We know, for example, that more politically engaged voters tend to be more loyal and partisan. So, one potential effect of non-stop political activation is the possibility of increased loyalty and more stable voting bases; which is good for the parties, but bad for democracy. A more stable and less dynamic electorate is one that’s no longer rewarding or punishing parties based on actions, but is instead robotically choosing whatever it is they chose last time.
The idea that our choice, in a matter with such serious consequence, might be less than our own, is scary to us. But is it scary to the people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince you? Do you really think that they’re spending all that money on untested moonshots?
It’s my suspicion that the reason our brands/parties get away with lying about how they’re going to help us is because it doesn’t matter. The dark arts of marketing and branding have so thoroughly done their jobs, that not delivering on promises has ceased being an obstacle. The votes of tens of millions of Americans have already been won. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Through clever branding and slick marketing, political parties have managed to cleanly divorce the actual act of governing from voting.
The tools used to gather data about us are improving. Brilliant people continue to dedicate all of their working hours towards trying to unlock the mysteries of the human brain, so that their employers can more effectively sell you a widget or two.
Equally brilliant people continue to develop better means of delivering a sales pitch to you. From the necessarily broad classified ads in a paper, to the more precise but still quite broad direct mailers, we’ve moved to ads that are so finely honed that they sometimes seem uncanny.
We are constantly, oftentimes imperceptibly, being manipulated. Pushed or pulled in one direction or another, towards one outcome or away from a different one. Politics may not have fully embraced this until relatively recently, but they have now.
These technologies will continue to march forward, spurred on not just by a company’s desire for a more robust bottom line, but by us the consumers. A consumption culture is driven not just by the right to always be buying, but by the right to always be sold.
This November, we will go to the poll and decide which pitch we will buy. We will put our vote on the barrel head with no guarantee; and, per usual, we will be angered when the pitch does not manifest, we will get angry and we will be back to buy the same pitch all over again in 2028, because that’s what American consumers/voters do.