I don’t vote and I have little interest in politics, but Scott Adams’ latest post about the RNC convention held my interest:
Persuasion-wise, Trump’s family was the big story of the convention. People seem to love them in the same way the public loved the Kennedys. And notice how Donald Jr. and Eric both have the speaking cadence of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. Notice also how Melania reminds you of Jackie Kennedy – quiet, smart, and classy. These are coincidences, but your irrational brain doesn’t care. It sees a new batch of Kennedys and wants to see more of them. That’s powerful election magic for a nation that only pretends to care about policies.
A week ago you compared ugly Donald Trump with ugly Hillary Clinton and declared them a visual tie. That matters because our visual “brain” generally wins against whatever part of the brain is pretending to be logical that day. But once we got a look at the entire Trump family, acting as a group, our visual brains started seeing them as a package deal. And when you compare the entire Trump family’s visual appeal to the entire Clinton family’s visual imagery it’s a massacre.
Would you prefer seeing Bill and Hillary Clinton decompose in front of your eyes for eight years, or watch the Trump family develop their dynasty? Entertainment-wise, that’s no contest. And people usually vote for entertainment over policy. They just don’t realize it. That’s the biggest news from the convention, and you won’t see it in any headline.
No one cares about policies since policy discussions are boring. We get excited when we identify with someone, and we feel safe, which serves one of our lizard brain’s prime directives. Politicians, the smart ones, know how to identify with people, even people who might hate their policies. For all of Trump’s offensiveness early on in the election cycle, he still got ahead because he, as a person, is rather likeable. At the very least he can convince you not to hate him. Throw in his attractive, successful, safe, “normal” family, through the medium of television, and you’ve got a shoe-in candidate.
Again: no one cares about policies because no one votes rationally. We’re wired to connect to others when we share a minimum level of identification with them, and we can identify strongly by what we see on the television. Which candidate, literally, looks better to you?
3 Comments
Oh, goody; you left me an opening to nit-pick on grammar — it’s “shoo-in”.
Hah! I don’t think I’ve ever read the phrase in writing, so I’ve always thought it was “shoe.”
Don’t ask me how, but I’ve been exposed to a lot of phrases that folks typically misspell, like “toe the line” or “defuse a situation” — both are military phrases. God alone knows why I remember them.