10/04/2024

How Campaigns Use Psychology To Get Out The Vote

16:41 minutes

A hand sticking a brain into a poll box
Photo collage by Emma Gometz

We’re one month away from the presidential election. The campaigns are in high gear,  trying to get their messages out, and hoping that those messages will be enough to motivate voters to both go to the polls—and to vote in their favor. 

But just how solid are people’s political opinions at this point? Can anyone be swayed at this point by another debate, campaign ad, or stump speech talking point? And how do campaigns judge the mood of the electorate to better position their messages? 

Dr. Jon Krosnick, director of the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University, joins Ira Flatow to talk about political decision-making, the ways campaigns can influence voters, the effectiveness of polling, and what researchers know about how people make and hold opinions.


Further Reading

Segment Guests

Jon Krosnick

Dr. Jon Krosnick is a professor of Political Science, Communication, and Psychology and the director of the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University in Stanford, California.

Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. We’re one month away from the presidential election with the campaigns in high gear, trying to get their message out and hope that those messages will be enough to motivate voters to go to the polls and to vote in their favor. But just how solid are people’s opinions at this point? Are there actually these undecided voters we hear so much about? And what do we know about how people make and hold opinions? Can they be swayed? Joining me now to talk about that is Dr. Jon Krosnick. He’s a professor of Political Science, Communication, and Psychology and Director of the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University. Welcome to Science Friday.

JON KROSNICK: Thank you, Ira. Great to be with you.

IRA FLATOW: So as I say, we’re a month away. We’ve had vice presidential debate this week, many polls showing a close race. How malleable are people’s opinions at this stage?

JON KROSNICK: Well you might think that Americans at this point would know so much about Donald Trump having watched his presidency, having seen so much of him since his presidency, that their views of him would be solidly crystallized. And that may well be true for many people. But let’s face it, there are also people in this electorate who feel conflict or ambivalence about him.

And those folks being ambivalent are therefore in the potentially undecided and malleable category. And Kamala Harris, of course, has been on the scene for a while. But for many Americans, she’s relatively new in the spotlight just for a couple of months. And so, again, as they look at her, they may see pros and cons. And that then allows them to be conflicted as well.

But there are other bases for being undecided as well. The American electorate has been known for many decades by political scientists to be mixtures of what we might call liberal positions and conservative positions. So in other words, relatively few people in the American electorate are entirely on one side or the other. Most people are a mix of some positions on one side and some positions on the other side, and that also makes them vulnerable to indecision if the candidates take clear positions and create some sense of conflict.

IRA FLATOW: Both sides say that turnout is going to be a key in this election. What are some of the ways that people can be motivated to go to the polls?

JON KROSNICK: Campaign professionals and political scientists decades ago used to think that turnout and candidate choice were kind of two separate decisions, turnout coming first and candidate choice coming second. In other words, you decide whether you’re going to vote or not. And then once you decide that you’re going to vote, then you decide who you’re going to vote for. And what we’ve come to realize very clearly now through really terrific data is that those decisions are intimately linked, that there are some people who vote all the time no matter what. There are some people who never vote no matter what, but there are other people who slide in and out of the participating electorate.

And those decisions about whether to vote or not are sometimes influenced by their attitudes toward the candidates. What can the campaigns do to affect turnout. Some of the most important work that we know in our literature comes from a guy named Don Green, who is a professor at Columbia University. And when he was at Yale, he was doing really revolutionary studies that were large field experiments where he randomly assigned households either to get poked in one way or another to inspire them to vote or not.

And what’s interesting is that Dawn’s work actually followed work by a prior scholar, social psychologist, Tony Greenwald, who is now at the University of Washington. And what Tony did were very simple studies. He did telephone surveys where undergraduates at the University of Washington called a set of people registered to vote and told them one of two things.

They said hi, calling from the University of Washington psychology Department. We’re doing a survey, just one question today are you going to vote in the election on Tuesday or not? Or other randomly chosen people were asked Psychology Department at the University of Washington calling, we’re doing a one question survey, who do you think is going to win the Seattle Seahawks game on Sunday? So the idea here is the first group got a treatment. The treatment was simply asking them if they’re going to vote.

And the second group was the control group who didn’t get that treatment. And it turns out the people who were asked if they’re going to vote, voted significantly more often. I think at least 10 percentage points more often from one question in one interview a few days before the election. What happened there? Well, what happened was everybody kind of knew that the socially admirable thing to say was that they’re going to vote. And people who merely hadn’t made the decision, who were undecided about whether they were going to vote or not, heard themselves saying, I’m going to vote. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are various different ways to get people to do things, to create self-fulfilling prophecies like that, which actually do affect their subsequent behavior. And Tony just implemented one version of that. And so what Don then did was to do these kinds of treatments in three different ways, by mailing postcards to people, by making phone calls to people, or by having people go to the doorstep of their home and engage them in a conversation about the election.

Obviously, a postcard doesn’t ask you a question, but a phone call and a conversation on the doorstep had the potential to engage that same kind of self-fulfilling prophecy logic. And what Don found is that, in general, the phone calls didn’t work. And lots of people are making phone calls on behalf of candidates these days. And it might make them feel good to make those phone calls. But the reality is his work suggested probably not going to have much effect.

On the other hand, the face to face mobilization worked remarkably well. And now it’s critical that the conversation on the doorstep do the right things and not do the wrong things. It’s also critical for a campaign that wants to mobilize supporters that it not send people to knock on the doors of households of people who are going to vote for their opposing candidate.

IRA FLATOW: Is there any evidence that there are people who go into the polls, look at the candidates up there on the board, and they then– that’s at the point, they make their mind up?

JON KROSNICK: Absolutely. I’m sorry to tell you that we have decades of research showing that there are some people who walk into a voting booth or sit down with an absentee ballot. And when they look at the names on that ballot, those names are in a particular order because, of course, candidate names are always presented visually. And that order of names nudges voters in a particular direction.

In fact, more than 1,000 published tests have now shown that in 85% of elections, approximately, the candidate listed first on the ballot gets an advantage that is about an average of two to three percentage points of votes as a result simply of being first. And that results from two psychological processes. One, is again, ambivalence. So if you’re torn, Clinton, Trump, Clinton, Trump, I don’t know what to do. And one of those names is above, people tend to lean in the direction of the name above.

But secondly, there are people who vote who don’t actually know that much about all the candidates. And so those that lack of information makes them nudgeable also. So if you want to think about a two to three percentage point effect as not that important. I mean, in 2000, George W Bush was elected president as a result of a vote count in Florida that gave him a margin of victory of much less than one percentage point. And guess what. George W Bush’s name was listed first on every ballot in Florida that year, because the law in Florida is that it’s the party of the governor who has all their candidates listed first on every ballot. And George W Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, was the governor that year.

In 2016, in nearly all of the battleground states where Donald Trump won by a tiny margin, his name was listed first on every ballot. And you might say oh, come on, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton. How could name order possibly matter? Well, it turns out New Hampshire rotated name order across the state. And so we can actually look at whether Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton got more votes when they were listed first. And what we found was about a point and a half, a percentage point and a half advantage for each of them when they were listed first as compared to when they weren’t in that election, which involved, as you know, a lot of ambivalence for Americans.

It’s really hard to make elections fair. But the important question at this point is who’s going to be first in those battleground states. And if you want to be horrified a little bit more, I’ll tell you that as far as I know, none of the polls that are being done are taking into account the bias that will be created by candidate names.

IRA FLATOW: So is there– does that mean there’s a flaw in the polling?

JON KROSNICK: Absolutely, the good news is that scientists know how to do accurate surveys. Even today, you say, well, nobody answers the phone and that everybody’s got cell phones and the various other complaints. The reality is scientists who’ve evaluated the accuracy of survey data have found that as long as you do true random sampling of households or individuals and you work hard to interview as many of those people as you can and you use unbiased questions, the results are incredibly accurate.

So I’ll just give you an example that in 2016, the year when we all were told before the election by The New York Times and by the fivethirtyeight.com that Hillary Clinton had more than an 80% chance of becoming president based on polls. In that year, If you look at only the polls that were done with random sampling during the week before the election, their average error in predicting the Trump and Clinton shares of the vote was less than one percentage point off, less than 1%. That’s much smaller than the theoretical margin of error of those polls.

On the other hand, the market was flooded in 2016 with non-random samples that were promulgated by two organizations, SurveyMonkey and Google consumer surveys. Those were done with what are called river samples. So these are, if you think of yourself as a fish swimming around in the internet, all of a sudden a net reaches in and pulls you out and asks you a question. In this case, if you’re reading a news story at a newspaper website, a little box pops up and says, you can continue reading the story for free after you answer this question, who are you going to vote for in the election on Tuesday?

Well, they said everybody reads the newspaper. The reality is this was not a random sample in any way. And those river sample surveys were startlingly inaccurate, average errors of six percentage points and more. And often errors as large as 13 or 14 percentage points. That’s not a surprise because there was no random sampling done in those surveys. But if you’re going to predict the battleground states, which are the only states you need to get right in order to forecast the outcome, you need much more precision than an average error of six percentage points.

So that is what I think importantly contributed to those incorrect predictions in 2016. So long story short there, we know how to do accurate polls. Are we doing simple random sample surveys right now the way we know we can? Almost nobody is. The market has flooded with more surveys that involve non-random samples, lots of them. And unfortunately, I’m sorry to say, some of the most visible and most praised pre-election surveys involve an entirely different methodology that’s also seriously flawed.

This involves random samples of people on lists of people registered to vote. So instead of calling a random sample of telephone numbers and giving all Americans an equal probability of being selected for a survey, this method involves first step is getting lists of people who are registered to vote in all the states, recognizing that mobilization efforts are going to cause more people to be registered between now and election day. Well, they can’t take that into account.

Secondly, when people are buying these lists from commercial companies, the polling groups that buy the lists are not told how long ago did the supplier get the list from the state. And so because people are constantly registering, those lists are likely to be out of date. And then after they get the lists, they only get names and addresses. Now, they’ve got to get phone numbers for those people in order to call them.

Well, it turns out can only get phone numbers for about half of the people on the list, and that half of the people with listed are available phone numbers is not a random sample of the whole list. Then you’ve got to somehow weight these data. And statistical weighting means adjusting for unequal probabilities of participation in different groups. So higher educated people agree to be interviewed more often than less educated people. In order to fix those discrepancies you have to know the true distributions of age and education and sex and so on in the population.

What’s your population? Well, it’s people registered to vote. How can you know the demographic characteristics of people registered to vote? You can’t. The government doesn’t know that. Nobody knows that. And so the companies selling these data make it up. They guess what your age is. They guess what your sex is. And when I’ve looked at what they think about me, I’ve been told I’m a 78-year-old female.

So the accuracy of those guesses is not great. The next steps are taken in all pre-election polls. You’ve got to decide among the people who are registered to vote, which of those people actually are going to vote or not. And then you’ve got to deal with the fact that when you do a survey and you say, well, if you do vote, who are you going to vote for, there’s a significant chunk of people, even up toward the end who will say, I won’t tell you because it’s confidential or I haven’t decided yet. And so the researchers have to handle that somehow. So there are a lot of steps in the process to produce accurate outcomes. What I can tell you is when we’ve looked at true random samples, it works beautifully.

IRA FLATOW: Well, what you’re telling me is that, then we should not be paying attention to most of these polls.

JON KROSNICK: That is absolutely correct. You should not.

IRA FLATOW: My last question to you is about the themes in this election. It seems to be there are two main themes in this election fear versus hope. As someone who studies political psychology, which one works more well?

JON KROSNICK: They both have effects. Fear causes people to be more thoughtful and attentive to information. Hope inspires positivity toward whatever candidate is making you feel hopeful. So if you’ll forgive me, let’s just say for the moment that Kamala Harris’s messages are inspiring hope. There’s reason to believe that taken by itself increases the probability that voters will vote for her. And we have lots of evidence from many, many statistical analyzes to support that idea.

Now, when Donald Trump says, I’m going to make America great again, that’s also potentially a hope inspiring message. But bear in mind also that a big part of his message is about fear. And it’s fear about what will happen if the Democrats continue to control the country. And what that does is doesn’t make people necessarily negative toward him, but it makes them thoughtful, it makes them attentive. It makes them look at the evidence.

And so the question is, does making people thoughtful help sell the Make America Great Again message or not? And from our point of view and our literature, I’m not sure it does.

IRA FLATOW: Well, this has certainly been thought provoking and eye opening. Dr. Krosnick, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today.

JON KROSNICK: It’s my great honor, thank you, Ira, for having me. I really appreciate it.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Dr. John Krosnick, Professor of Political Science, Communication, and Psychology and Director of the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University.

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